NASELLE, Wash. — Ever since a landslide buried an 80-foot-long section of Upper Naselle Road in December, the two couples who live above the slide have had to choose between two equally unsuitable alternative routes to their homes.

From State Route 4, they can follow Salmon Creek and Alanen roads north, and then head west along the Deep River Mainline. It’s a bone-rattling 9-mile drive, much of it on private dirt logging roads that are clearly marked with “Emergency Vehicles Only” signs.

This is the route Barbara Tallman, 62, took earlier this month when her husband, Bob Tallman, 73, began having heart pain and breathing difficulties at 2 a.m., and she decided to drive him to the hospital.

“There is no way an ambulance could have figured out how to get here,” Barbara Tallman said. “I was just thinking, ‘We’ve got to get there.’”

Alternately, the couples can follow Upper Naselle Road four miles east from SR4, park where the road terminates at a massive pile of dirt and uprooted trees, and then walk the rest of the way.

Randy Lewis, 66, prefers to hike the quarter mile to the 84-acre riverside farm he shares with his wife, Christin. From the top of the slide, there’s a stunning, unexpected glimpse of the emerald green Naselle River sparkling in the bottom of the canyon.

It’s a long, long way down.

At the site of the slide, Upper Naselle Road is situated midway up a steep canyon wall that is gradually being undercut by a bend in the river. Last December, a month’s-worth of rain fell in the first 12 days, thoroughly saturating the slope down to its foundation of decaying rock.

The slide started roughly 150 feet above the road, where a hulk of weak, fractured siltstone is poised above a nearly vertical incline. At first, there was a gradual trickle of debris that led the county to mark off part of the road with orange cones. A couple days later, a few thousand cubic yards of soil, evergreens, crumbling rock and small boulders tumbled down, taking out a section of a low retaining wall that the county had built to hold back small slides. Some of the debris landed in a 15 foot-deep heap on the pavement, but most of it careened over the edge of the road and down into the canyon, a total distance of 300 or 400 feet.

In the middle of winter, the Lewises and Tallmans were suddenly even more cut off from civilization than usual. Despite their repeated requests to county officials, the slide remains untouched.

The two couples find the lack of action frustrating, partly because the current situation is inconvenient and dangerous, and partly because they think the county Department of Public Works might have prevented the slide by giving more attention to the road. They also think the county suddenly allowed an influx of logging truck traffic in the midst of December rains, and wonder if the two events are linked.

County officials counter that the road has been a hazard for years, and is now so unstable that it probably can’t be saved. In an April report, a geotechnical team hired by the county recommended closing the road. The engineers, from the Vancouver, Washington, firm Hart-Crowser, said the “slide zone” posed “a significant risk to public safety.” Due to the undercutting at the base of the slope and the huge mass of unstable rock at the top, the engineers concluded that there was no economically feasible way to fix it.

“In our opinion, sudden catastrophic failure … could occur without warning during moderate to heavy precipitation,” the report said. “Such a failure could feasibly cause loss of life …”

County Commissioner Steve Rogers has visited the slide site a few times, and thinks he has a pretty good idea of just how dangerous Randy Lewis’ current commute is.

“I almost fell, halfway, walking the slide,” Rogers said. He plans to visit again later this week with state Sen. Dean Takko and Rep. Brian Blake.

“We’re still working on alternatives, trying to develop the shortest route,” Rogers said. “I’m tearing my hair out trying to figure this out. I feel terrible for them.”

So far though, the prognosis is grim. The Hart-Crowser team found “abundant evidence” of “a long history of failures” in the area, possibly stretching back as far as ancient times. The experts the county consulted “generally determined, ‘Don’t touch it,’” Rogers said.

“Others have said they could fix it — to the tune of $50,000,” Rogers said, but when he asks if they could guarantee the road would be safe, they back down.

The section of road that is buried under the landslide was actually built from the rubble from a previous landslide. During a period of continuous rain in late March 2003, “The hillside gave away, totally covering the road, and went down into the river,” a Department of Public Works road crew supervisor said.

The department quickly brought in six men, two dump trucks, an excavator and a backhoe to clear the road, but rains often made it too dangerous to work, so they didn’t complete the job until mid-May 2003. According to a May 2003 Chinook Observer article, “After removing several thousand yards of slide material, the county finally decided to build a new roadbed, leaving much of the slide material, which raised the road an estimated 12 to 15 feet above the old roadbed.” The crew also installed the retaining wall, as well as a plastic pipe culvert that now shoots water into the canyon on wet days.

Both couples say that except for a short period in December, logging trucks didn’t use Upper Naselle Road for most of a decade. During a tour of the slide in early May, they said county officials had said they had banned the behemoth trucks in 2003 or 2004.

“They said no more logging trucks would come in on this road, ever again,” Barbara Tallman said.

It’s not clear whether there were ever official restrictions. Department of Public Works Director Mike Collins provided the geotechnical report, but did not return a call, and the Observer could not obtain public records in time for publication. The county did at least temporarily limit traffic.

“The road is limited to one-way traffic for small vehicles only, with no heavy truck traffic allowed,” the May 2003 article said.

Randy Lewis said he was shocked when a steady flow of logging trucks began using the road. One morning, he felt a sudden rumbling, looked around for the source of the vibrations, and noticed concentric rings forming on the surface of his coffee. Trucks were headed up the road toward a logging site north of their homes. He was furious.

The couples both called the Department of Public Works to find out what was going on, and say that they had very similar conversations with a county staffer, who said truckers were using Upper Naselle, because a bridge on their usual route was on the brink of collapsing.

“He said, ‘Right now, the loggers want to have a good Christmas,’” Barbara Tallman recalled. “Then the slide happened.”

“I’d just like to have the road open,” Bob Tallman said, as his wife carefully steered their small, two-wheel drive SUV down a washboard dirt logging road. “My wife’s had two flat tires. It just beats our vehicles up.”

The Tallmans worry about relying on a route where there are no cellphone signals, bad conditions and numerous private roads that could be gated at any time. What will happen if another emergency or a very bad storm occurs?

“I’m always maintaining the road!” Barbara Tallman joked, noting that she’d stopped to clear rocks from a bend in the road just that morning.

The Lewises also worry about how it would affect Naselle, if the only public route to the beautiful river valley is cut off. In the summer and fall, a steady stream of outdoors enthusiasts travel up to fish and hunt, Lewis said, and those visitors bring a lot of business to the area, and act as champions for an underappreciated natural attraction.

“If that river ain’t worth saving, then we’ve lost as a society,” Lewis said.

“It’s not a matter of money, it’s a matter of whether it can be done or not,” Rogers said. He insisted that the county is not writing off the road, the valley or its residents.

“Mrs. Lewis is right,” Rogers said, referring to Christin Lewis’ comments at a recent public meeting. “It’s hard on the cars, it’s hard on everything. It seems like Mother Nature always wins. But we’re not taking this lightly — we take this very seriously.”