Placer County, California Bridges: Yankee Jim's Bridge across the North Fork of the American River (1)

August 2012 (39.04000 Degrees, -120.90278 Degrees) Yankee Jim's Bridge

About 4 miles downstream from the Iowa Hill Bridges is Yankee Jim's suspension bridge. It looks similar to the Iowa Hill Bridge except it's much higher up, out of the river, and it carries vehicles. 

According to the Bridgehunter, the Yankee Jim Bridge (19C0002) is a wire suspension bridge built in 1930 with a 210 ft span and with 13.7 ft vertical clearance above the deck. The website goes on to say that the bridge is structurally deficient with a score of 2.1 out of 100 and an average daily traffic of 549 vehicles.

Both the Iowa Hill Bridges and Yankee Jim's Bridge cross the North Fork of the American River in Placer County. This is a long misshapen county, stretching from the Sacramento Valley across the Sierra Mountains to the State of Nevada. The southern border is the Middle Fork of the American River and much of the northern border is the Bear River.

I grew up in a part of Michigan where all the counties are rectangular (and made up of rectangular townships). California has 58 counties. All the bridge numbers in Placer County begin with the number 19 (and a C if it's a county bridge). We'll take a closer look at Yankee Jim's Bridge and other bridges in Placer County over the next few days.

Placer County, California Bridges: Yankee Jim's Bridge across the North Fork of the American River (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.