September 2, 2008: South end of IA 15
July 23, 2009: North end of IA 140
June 14, 2011: South end of IA 62
Fifteen years ago today, after a couple weeks of “beta launch,” I let other roadgeeks know that I had created the Iowa Highway Ends website. At the time, the pictures were exclusively in the box of an area between Ames and Waterloo, but I had much bigger ambitions.
In June 2015, I finished traveling every mile of every highway in Iowa (now the recently relocated IA 31 and, as of yesterday, IA 100 extension await). Between March 20, 2003, and October 4, 2016, I visited every incorporated community in Iowa. I have also entered 1470 counties in the United States, including all of them in Iowa and Illinois. With the exception of the very newly christened I-41 and 50 miles of I-94 west of Mandan ND, I’ve traveled every interstate in the Central Time Zone part of the Midwest.
Highways in Iowa and the “roadgeek community” — not to mention the nature of the Internet itself — have changed a lot over a decade and a half. The Second Great Decommissioning happened, suddenly freezing in time a great deal of my early photos. About 75 miles of four-lane US 20 opened, moving its route significantly from segments that had been around since its birth 90 years ago. The misc.transport.road user group that traced its roots back to Usenet was abandoned. GribbleNation is shutting down, to be replaced with a scaled-down version Jan. 1. Dale Sanderson completely retooled his USEnds.com website a month ago with a new layout and inlaid Google Street View images. Signage was standardized at interchanges across Iowa at the cost of unique shield assemblies and distance signs. The Iowa DOT has made information available online that I would’ve spent days in the bowels of the archives to find a decade ago (and, in the case of microfilm research from 1920 to 1940, did precisely that). And then, of course, practically no one makes a personal website anymore, not after social media ate the world. (Angelfire is still there, at least, the part of my website that was local to my first web address.) I’m practically retro (not quite as retro as those still running Mac OS 9, but not that far off either).
I don’t plan on changing anything (at least, not as long as my computer holds out, knock on wood). I’ve been writing HTML for four-sevenths of my life now. I don’t have time for bells and whistles. Heck, I barely have time to add to what I already have up. (I spent a whole evening working on pages with fall 2015 photos, promise!) Perhaps 2017 will be a year of taking what I’ve done and getting that online.