Placer County, California Bridges: Yankee Jim's Bridge across the North Fork of the American River (4)

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

A last few photos of Yankee Jim's Bridge. These four-legged, lattice tower suspension bridges are simple but effective for spans under a couple hundred feet. Note the hardware used to anchor the cables into the ground. I wonder what the criteria was to limit the maximum load to 3 tons?

The bridge was built in 1930 and put together with cables, rods, rivets, and angle iron. I read that a work crew of immigrant Chinese laborers came through with hand tools and dynamite to build the road. They still report a few deaths every year from people driving too fast around its turns.

The bridge is 82 years old, its covered in rust, and it has a sufficiency rating of 2.1. I wonder if Placer County has plans to replace it, what kind of bridge it would be, and how much it would cost?

Placer County, California Bridges: Yankee Jim's Bridge across the North Fork of the American River (4) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.