{"id":62944,"date":"2025-05-23T09:31:36","date_gmt":"2025-05-23T16:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=62944"},"modified":"2025-05-23T09:31:36","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T16:31:36","slug":"light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heuermontage.com\/?p=62944","title":{"rendered":"Light at the end of the tunnel."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By all reports, it used to be a happy place. A house right next to a “Tunnel of Many Vistas”, an engineering marvel from 1915 on the original 73-mile route of the Columbia River Highway, the first major paved highway in the Pacific Northwest and the first scenic highway constructed in the United States. By the 1930s, that building became a roadhouse, a service station, a restaurant and a bunch of rental cabins for overnighters who drove their cars out to Hood River, admiring the tunnel along the way. Much dancing, fueled by moonshine, gregarious company and fun throughout the Prohibition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The original Mitchell Point Tunnel was closed in 1953, no longer safe, and no longer able to accommodate increased numbers of ever larger cars. It was ultimately destroyed and filled with rocks in 1966 to widen I-84. (The basalt that constitutes the surrounding mountain and delivered those rocks, is in itself a thing of beauty – just look at the coloration!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Want to join me for a short walk? The tunnel is now rebuilt and connected to the Historic Highway State Trail<\/a> through a steep mountain at Mitchell Point, open for hikers (and eventual bikers) only. (You can reach it by car, but parking is extremely limited (fewer than 20 spaces with no off-rad alternative available. So choose timing wisely.) The State Trail hopes to connect The Dalles with Troutdale once again, a stretch of 68 miles or so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The choice to visit this place, opened to the public less than two months ago, was the perfect antidote to the feelings incited by this week’s news. For me it was the mix of assaults against individual people or groups combined with attacks on ideas and values, never mind the law, that registered as such heavy burden. To name just a few: a brain-dead Georgia woman<\/a> kept alive on tubes to serve as an incubator to her unborn baby due to new restrictive abortion laws, with her family having to foot the bill for the next many months, never mind not facing a form of closure. Birthing machines, even in death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The passage of the “big beautiful bill,” that will deprive millions of kids and people living with disability of food, and kick over 13 million people off health insurance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n