Somebody emailed a question that sent me on a bike ride out Queen Avenue to Riverside Drive in Albany last week. What I saw was that access to an area off the northwest corner of this junction had been cut off.
Albany’s small hydropower plant has been shut down for more than a year, which I didn’t discover until I asked about it this week. And I doubt it will ever operate again.
It would not be winter if Bryant Park in Albany didn’t get flooded for at least a few days, sometimes for weeks.
If you’re wondering why Albany’s Bryant Park is still closed to motor vehicles weeks after the annual flooding has subsided — and even if you’re not wondering about that — it’s because the cleanup is not complete.
On my first bike ride after Oregon’s mid-January ice and snowstorm, I found Bryant Way closed near the Albany city limit.
Going up the Third Avenue bridge from Bryant Way on Saturday, I looked to my right to see if the shaft of the Albany hydropower turbine was rotating. What caught my attention instead was the two-tone coloring of the Calapooia River below.
Why all the trash? Because we allow it
That’s the trouble with winter: The foliage is gone and you can see the trash that people have left behind where, in summer, it’s hidden in the bushes.
Tags: Calapooia River, homeless, Queen Avenue, trash piles, vagrancy