There are a few locations in the U.S. where you can experience gasoline range anxiety firsthand. I found one of them on Washington Route 504 passing through the little town of Toutle. This is the road into Mount St. Helens from Interstate 5. I’ve passed by this road for decades and never had the chance to try it until recently.
There is a lone gas station in Toutle. Across the street from it on the highway is an ominous blue road sign that simply says, “No Gas Ahead.” I was short on time, driving a rental car and not really sure how far I was going to get before the Johnston Ridge Observatory Park at the base of Mount St. Helens would close. Adding spice to the trip was the fact that this is also part of the world where internet is pretty iffy.
There were no cars heading east in my direction and just a few heading west back out toward civilization. I should have stopped for fuel, but how many times have people said that? I did some quick travel math, guessing at my fuel economy, factoring in the fact that I would be climbing some pretty steep terrain, but also would be mostly coasting back down, and figured I might just make it on what was left in my gas tank.
The drive to St. Helens is phenomenal, especially if you’ve been living in Texas for years. I stopped frequently to take photos and breathe in the fresh mountain air. The end of the road is 41 miles beyond the Toutle gas station. I began to question my decision when about 8 miles up the road from Toutle I passed an abandoned Shell gas station. After that, there were only a couple signs of civilization with the gaping snowcapped maw of the volcano on the horizon. After climbing for miles, the road dives down to the valley floor before reaching the Observatory. On the return trip I was sweating as I climbed back out of the valley before reaching a point where most of the road was again downhill back into Toutle.
The experience got me thinking about range anxiety, and particularly the “No Gas Ahead” sign seemed somewhat prescient for society. If the future is to be a zero-emissions one, gas stations will become rarer over time and drivers of gasoline vehicles will start experiencing range anxiety more frequently.
Back in Texas, I passed a relic of the early days of gasoline cars. The tiny crossroad town of Driftwood sports an old Texaco gas station. Turns out the Texas DOT has written a great history of gas stations in Texas titled A Field Guide to Gas Stations in Texas by W. Dwayne Jones. Driftwood’s Texaco station is what Jones refers to as a drive-up (or curbside) station – one of the earliest deployments circa 1910 to 1920. This guide is an excellent read to understand how we transitioned from horse-drawn wagons to a gas station on nearly every block, and now to the new mega stations.
Electric charging stations and hydrogen fueling stations are starting from essentially no installations, just as gasoline stations did back in 1910. The gasoline fueling network evolved as demand grew. Innovative businesses experimented with the infrastructure as it expanded. Not all the experiments worked. It was trial and error. There were stranded assets.
