Taylor's Mile 22.8 Fragment

March 25, 2020

Don't get me wrong, Taylor's Road of Difficulties: Building the Lower Columbia River Highway has been an incredibly useful and informative source on the LCRH, but it is not without it's flaws.

The virtual mile posts he uses in the "Exploring the Highway" chapter are not matching well with the mileages I am getting from Google Earth, he often falls into the trap of thinking of the compass in terms of westbound and eastbound (I am guilty of this myself too often), not true north and south, so often when he says that something is on the highway's south side, it will be on its east side when the CRH is running north/south, and he seems to have skipped over the whole Old Portland Road Route 2 alignment through St. Helens (though he does mention the verifiable, original Milton Creek Bridge).

So... Why bring this up? Why not just let it be? Because in my quest to be all-inclusive on cataloging old highway fragments, I am having a heck of a time tracking this one down, which he lists as being between the Warren School ("22.7 miles") and Warren ("23.1 Miles"):

Mile 22.8: Highway Fragment

This .1-mile long fragment is visible running parallel to Highway 30 on its south side (to left).

The only real possibility I can spot in Google Earth, below, is on the southeast side of the highway (clearly, "to left" is a mistake with his westbound orientation).

Taylor's fragment would be 2.3 miles westbound from Honeyman Creek ("20.5"), and this spot is only about 1.07 miles from the creek. And it's nowhere near Warren. But it seems like the most likely location for this small fragment, and it is about ".1-mile long".

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