Stringtown Road reopens after three-day closure caused by fallen cottonwood

Stringtown Road reopened late Thursday afternoon, capping the end — for now — of a three-day saga that took out electricity, internet, and a road linking Gales Creek to Dilley. In the end, it was ants to blame for taking down a mighty tree that cracked a concrete bridge in the historic community of Watts. The bridge is damaged, but open for business, the county said. The Department of Land Use and Transportation will examine repairing the damage at a later date. Washington County Bridge 1280 was built in 1958, is 184 feet long, 28.7 feet wide, and was last inspected August 21, 2024, according to a bridge inventory kept by the state of Oregon. At the time, it was given a "fair" rating. “Once the repair design is finalized, we’ll have a clearer sense of the full scope, but no further future repairs are anticipated at this time,” said LUT spokesperson Emma Ross. When the bridge was built in 1958, the tree that fell Tuesday was already growing on the south shore of Gales Creek. It survived the Columbus Day Storm of 1962, the flood of 1996, and every cold snap, windstorm and drought in between. The tree, a stone’s throw from where Joseph Gale built a mill before his name ended up on the creek, the nearby mountain, and eventually a community, a school, and more, lived through the Cold War and the birth of K-pop. It couldn’t survive the ants. Now, it lies in many pieces, rounds stacked at one end of the bridge, the bulk of the trunk bisected and discarded on the creek bank. Some lies in the creek itself, where it may well sit until this winter. The remains of the cottonwood. Photos: Chas Hundley As for the bridge, one section of the concrete rail lies noticeably lower than the rest of the bridge, and a crack several feet long mars the roadway near the edge of the southbound lane, where large construction barrels keep wayward tires from damaging it further. And, running madly across the warm concrete — hundreds of ants. 0:00 /0:02 1× ANTS. Video: Chas Hundley