Anne and I drove out into the Columbia Gorge on Friday afternoon for a bike adventure. We parked at Wyeth trailhead and rode east on the Columbia River Highway trail. It’s a paved trail, in three sections, that follows the path of the old highway. It’s very scenic, with both striking views up and down the river as well as quieter forested sections.
The newest section of the trail is the reconstruction of the Mitchell Tunnel, which I think was originally dynamited through the side of a mountain in the 1920s. (Actually, I'm wrong -- this article describes the history of the entire trail and the new tunnel.) It was restored and opened for foot traffic earlier this spring. But on the map, and in the description of the area, it seemed like the tunnel was a 1-mile stretch of trail disconnected from the rest of the trail system. Anne and I set out to see if there was any way to get between the official end of the old paved trail and the beginning of this new section.
We had a number of dead ends. We went into the forest and the trail ended abruptly at a creek -- the pavement literally was sawed off, and you could tell a bridge had once been there. We followed another trail and hopped over another creek only to find that the foot trail ended on the other side. Finally, we discovered that we had to walk very close to the highway for a couple hundred yards, and then a wide gravel trail started again (it shrank to a narrow hiking trail after a bit, but persisted.) We found the new parking lot and the entrance to the reopened tunnel, and it was pretty spectacular. Wide views up and down the river, a really cool-looking tunnel with semi-circular cutouts, just really fun.
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