Much progress is being made on the Territorial Highway Project at Stony Point the past few weeks. A traffic light has been installed and a concrete barrier has been erected so that one-way traffic can proceed in a single lane around the worst part of the existing road that has no shoulders.
What they are calling “the big fill” is showing progress below where the new, less curvy route is being built. The new arrangement has alleviated a lot of our nervousness in driving in the area where there were not only no shoulders, but where traffic had to be navigated at the edge of steep drop-offs. Thank you, Lane County!
***
Lorane residents have been commenting about the thousands of blackbirds and starlings that have been lining all of the utility lines and ground along the straight stretch of Territorial as it passes King Estate Winery.
We discovered that their presence was related to power interruptions almost daily – just long enough to make us have to reset our clocks. It seems that the birds have been attracted to the grapes at King Estate that were not picked because of wildfire smoke and ash in September.
We’ve been told by Lane Electric that the weight of so many of them sitting on the lines have been shorting out wires.
***
This year’s 2020 Groundwaters anthology (“The Year of Crises” issue) has been sent to Amazon.com for distribution. It will be buried in the time capsule with other memorabilia from 2020 by BRING and won’t be dug up and opened until 2120. How exciting!
