By Mike Westby
The Mountain Times
Like the 1937 Steiner Log Church in Welches, OR, there’s another “new” historical destination on Mt. Hood – the old plank road to Government Camp.
In 1845 and 1846, Sam Barlow and his crew scraped the treacherous Barlow Road across the southern flanks of Mt. Hood, and soon Oregon Trail pioneers were traversing its rugged route westward to the Willamette Valley. With the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, however, the number of Oregon Trail pioneers began to dwindle, and the road began taking on a new purpose, serving as an overland route back east to The Dalles and eastern Oregon, as well as helping to open up the Mt. Hood area to a nascent world of recreational use. Soon travelers and recreationalists were making three-day journeys up to Government Camp from the Portland area by four-horse carriages and stagecoaches. What was once a rutted rough passage through the forest was slowly becoming a true road, albeit unpaved, with improvements being made every year. In 1903, the very first automobile made the journey up to Government Camp from Portland, and only three years later, in 1906, George Routledge began running an auto stage line, taking advantage of the improving dirt road and the developing travel facilities along the route.
With growing options for transportation, adventurers were now setting out for Mt. Hood on multi-day or week long trips, looking to enjoy exploring, hiking, fishing, berry picking and camping on the mountain’s forested flanks. This meant the road up to Government Camp was now busier than ever. However, it was still a dirt road, and the underpowered automobiles of the early 1900s would often become bogged down in the mud, typically right after a good rainstorm or in the melting snows, requiring drivers to put on chains just to make their way along or to climb a slight incline.
The solution for dealing with all of the mud was to lay thick cedar boards, or planks, perpendicular across the road, lined up one next to the other so as to create a long “boardwalk” that drivers could drive upon. These were known as plank roads, and they were modeled after the concept of corduroy roads, where the same construction technique was used, except with small diameter logs. Being expensive to build and requiring continual maintenance, plank roads were built only over those sections that were persistently muddy.
In time, the dirt road to Government Camp was replaced with the paved two-lane Mt. Hood Highway, the predecessor to the road we all travel today. This narrow two-lane highway carved a new path on its way up the mountain, leaving much of the old dirt road with its sections of plank road abandoned, and the forest slowly began to reclaim it.
A few years ago, my wife and I were hiking near Government Camp when I noticed what appeared to be three cedar planks in the forest laying parallel to each other. Mostly covered by needles and roots, and softened by years and years of rain and snow, I gently scraped away enough of the duff to see that these were indeed planks laid here intentionally. Having read Ivan M. Woolley’s book about his exploits while shuttling passengers up and down the mountain in his 1907 Pierce Arrow, (Off to Mt. Hood – An Autobiography of the Old Road), I was familiar with the concept of plank roads, and I wondered if this was what I was looking at. Returning home, I did some research to determine if cedar could last for over 100 years without completely decomposing in such an environment, and I learned that examples of both corduroy and plank roads had recently been found, with a section of the 1856 “Great Plank Road” running from Tualatin to Portland having been uncovered in 2015. I reached out to Oregon’s State Historic Preservation Office to inquire if the section of plank road I had found near Government Camp was on their radar, and they replied that it was. In fact, they considered it a “known archaeological site,” and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
I’m of the opinion that, instead of the trail rotting away in obscurity over the next 100 years, it would be beneficial to the citizens of Oregon if the plank road were made part of a “historic trail,” complete with a couple of interpretive signs explaining the road’s significance and its role in Mt. Hood’s history and the evolution of Government Camp and recreation on the mountain.