New Wood Roof for PDX

PDX Terminal's new wood roof under construction - Jonathan House

The crown jewel of the Portland International Airport's massive $2 billion expansion is the upcoming mass timber roof for the main terminal. - Business Tribune

It will be big and impressive and may even become a landmark, though I don't know if it the outside will be noticeable.

Ginormous wooden buildings aren't a new thing here. A giant log cabin called the Forestry Building was constructed for the Lewis & Clark Exposition in Portland back in 1905.

Previous post about large wooden building in Portland.

Bank Robber Dream

The 1819 "Matron Head" large cent - about 1​¹⁄₈ inch in diameter
Worth about 90 cents in today's money

I am in a room with maybe 6 or 8 other people. Most people are sitting in chairs. It's not crowded, everyone has plenty of room. People are conversing. There is one guy standing up by a table and he tells us that he is a successful bank robber and to further his point he picks up a leather sack the size of a football and starts pouring out large, old, tarnished copper coins the size of half dollars. He has a pile of them for sure, but if they are copper they can't be worth much, except I've never seen any coins like that, at least not US coins. Whatever. He has some loot and he's not in jail, so I guess that counts as success.

Conversation goes on and my wife mentions that she has seen steamships in Missouri, and then the dream kind of fades away.

Lewis & Clark took the Missouri River on their Journey West

Steamships in Missouri seems kind of odd, but there is a port in Tulsa, and the Missouri River runs right through the center of Missouri from St. Louis to Kansas City, so maybe. 

A towboat with barges on the Missouri River near Atchison, Kansas

There is barge traffic on the Missouri River, but it isn't deep enough for ocean going ships at least not current ships. I think the Columbia River here in Portland is kept dredged to a depth of 40 feet which isn't a whole lot deeper than the 9 meter depth of the Missouri.

Crossing the Bitterroot Mountains

Getting around the Bitterroot Mountains
Jack & Randy have gone on an expedition to explore some old roads that cross the Continental Divide which happens to form part of the border between Idaho and Montana. The northern road (on the map) is the Lolo Motorway:

In the northern part of the state a famous travel corridor winds through the forests of the Bitterroot Mountains. It’s most well known as part of the route followed by the Lewis and Clark Expedition. But the Corps of Discovery was actually following the well established northern trail of the Nez Perce Indians. It was used by them for centuries to travel east into buffalo country in what is now Montana. In the early twentieth century a rough dirt road built by the Civilian Conservation Corps traced a good portion of the original Nez Perce Trail. That road is now known as the Lolo Motorway.

The southern one is the Magruder Road (pdf).

The 101-mile primitive Magruder Corridor Road winds through a vast undeveloped area, offering solitude and pristine beauty as well as  expansive mountain views. The landscape is much the same as when the  Nez Perce Indians and other early travelers crossed the area. The  road has changed little since its construction by the Civilian  Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. It has also been known as the  Southern Nez Perce Trail, Elk City to Darby Road, Montana Road and the Parker Trail.

I have taken I-90 across northern Idaho a few times. It follows the St. Regis River, mostly.

The yellow icon marks the Moose Creek Airstrip. Marc flew over there a couple of weeks ago in his new-to-him Piper Comanche. The Comanche is turbocharged, which means he can get up to 15,000 feet. On the way there, at that altitude, he picked up a tailwind which meant it only took him a couple of hours to get there. His co-conspirators in smaller, 100 MPH airplanes took almost 7 hours to get there.

Sergeant Floyd

Sergeant Floyd' grave - George Catlin 1832

We're planning a trip to Sioux City for later this summer, so I'm looking around to see if there might be something worth seeing, and I stumble over this painting of a big hill covered with grass. I like big fields of green grass. The painter, George Catlin, famous for paintings of American Indians, was probably the only white man in the area. Sergeant Floyd was a member of the Lewis & Clark expedition and died en route in 1804. Sioux City wasn't founded until 1854. There is a monument on top of the hill now.

100 Years of Propaganda

U.S. Navy of 1915

National Film Preservation Foundation has the video. It's interesting enough, but there's no sound, and no easy-to-copy embed code, so you'll have to follow the link to watch it. However, the blurb that accompanied this clip is just as interesting, and possibly more so:

We are indebted to independent scholar Charles “Buckey” Grimm for identifying this 11-minute piece of the celebrated “lost” three-reel documentary U.S. Navy of 1915, produced by the Lyman H. Howe Company. (The piece had formerly been known only as “U.S. Navy Fragment.”) The film was made with the full support of the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, who believed in the power of motion pictures to convince isolationists of the importance of building a strong American navy. A former newspaperman who knew the value of publicity, Daniels allowed Howe’s camera crew remarkable shipboard access. The results show sailors as they go about their day—doing repairs, cleaning the deck, exercising, as well as demonstrating naval might. The film drew praise as capturing “the pulse-beat of the complex life that throbs through our dreadnoughts from reveille to ‘taps.’”
This was not first time the Navy had turned to film to tell its story. Early on, the Navy had collaborated with the Biograph Company on a now-lost series of 60 short films showing sailors and officers at work. The series screened at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland before being put to use in a Midwest recruitment tour. Naval facilities and ships also figured prominently in early newsreels and narratives. The service took care to ensure that depictions presented it in a favorable light and reserved the right, for commercial films shot with official approval, to reuse them for the Navy’s own purposes.
Buckey identified the fragment through careful detective work involving the ships and ordnance on display in the fragment. For example, the “E-2” class submarine, pictured in the opening scene, was taken out of service in 1915, and the shells mentioned in a intertitle—“It costs the U.S. government $970.00 for each 14 inch projectile fired”—were added to the naval arsenal the year earlier. The clincher was matching a frame from the documentary with an image used in a newspaper piece to illustrate the Howe film. Buckey reported his research at the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium at New York University.
Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1856, Lyman Hakes Howe got his start as a traveling salesman. In the 1880s he switched to lecturing and demonstrated a miniature working coal mine on the road. When movies came along, he was among the first to make the transition. He devised his own projector, the Animotiscope, which upgraded the Edison machine by adding a second reel, and playing a phonograph to add sound. Soon he was making his own travelogues and newsreels. Little survives of his output other than this fragment.

Hey! Portland rates a mention! "1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland". Gee willickers, was Oregon even a state back then? (Yes, barely).

Via Posthip Scott.

If I only had a plane...

Homebuilt Pietenpol Sky Scout

My friend Marc bought an airplane yesterday. It's a homebuilt wood and fabric monoplane designed back before WWII. Oh, and the engine doesn't come with it. He has another source for an engine. So Monday evening we drive up to Goheen airport North of Vancouver (Washington) to start taking it apart in preparation for hauling it home. Marc and I meet in downtown Portland so we can save a little gas. We spend two hours loosening bolts and disconnecting guy wires so the final breakdown will be easy. We come back Tuesday evening with a medium size truck and a flat bed trailer.

They already have the engine off and hanging from a front end loader when I got there. It takes just over an hour to break down the airplane, load it up and tie all the pieces down. It was handy having three people to take the wings off: two to hold up the wing and one to fight the bolts out of their holes.

Disassembled Pietenpol

At least that's what I tell myself. I spent three hours driving there and back to spend 45 minutes working on this project. When I drove downtown Monday evening traffic was a bit jammed up going into downtown Portland, but it was only a couple miles and was expected. Tuesday evening it started raining and traffic came to a stop at 185th, a good ten miles from downtown. I decided I did not want to deal with creeping traffic for that much distance, so I took Cornelius Pass North to Highway 30, thence South to the St. Johns bridge, across North Portland (look Daddy, those people are black!) to I-5 and then North.

When I left, I am wondering if it might not have been shorter to drive up to Longview to cross the river, but I don't have a map with me. I know we are already quite a ways North, Longview can't be that far. I'll just go ahead and drive up there, then I'll know. Turns out it was another 25 miles. Got to drive across the Lewis and Clark bridge, an enormous 2 lane edifice. It must be a zillion feet high and five miles across. Of course it isn't, but it sure looked that way. Took me an hour and a half to get home. If I'd had an airplane I could have flown to the Hillsboro airport, which is only two miles from my house. It's only 25 miles. It would have taken 15 minutes in even a very slow airplane like Marc's Pietenpol.

Lewis and Clark Bridge, with Mount St. Helens, Washington.

The sharp eyed among you will notice that the airplane pictures are of two different airplanes. The first one is a similar aircraft fully assembled. The setting is similar, though the hanger we were in was much dirtier. The second one (of the yellow plane) is the pieces piled outside Marc's house. And that is Mt. St. Helens in the background of the bridge picture. The plane and the bridge are from the same era.

Route to Goheen airport and back

Update September 2016 replaced missing pictures, removed dead link.

Update April 2026 replaced missing map.