Australia's Bridges: Brickpit Ring Bridge in Sydney's Olympic Park (1)

March 2011 (-33.840 deg., 151.072 deg.) Brickpit Ring Bridge

When I asked The Happy Pontist which bridges to visit in Australia, one of his suggestions was the Brickpit Ring Bridge in Sydney's Olympic Park. 


Southeast Australia is composed of layers of shale (decomposed organic material) and sandstone (alluvial sediments) that make striking landscapes where they are uplifted and exposed in canyons (like in the Blue Mountains).  Part of Olympic Park was a quarry where this material was once used to make bricks for building much of Sydney. Before the 2000 Olympics, the organizers turned the quarry into a scenic wetland and built a circular bridge so visitors could walk around it without disturbing it's fragile ecology.

The bridge is a simple structure composed of steel elements and cables. We'll take a closer look at it tomorrow. The picture above is actually six photos that Photoshop's Automator turned into a panorama of the entire bridge.

Australia's Bridges: Brickpit Ring Bridge in Sydney's Olympic Park (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.