El Dorado County, California Bridges: Buck's Bar Road Bridge across the North Fork of the Cosumnes River (1)

February 2013 (38.6534 Degrees, -120.7017 Degrees) Buck's Bar Road Bridge

We're about 15 miles east of yesterday's Sand Creek Road Bridge along the North Fork of the Cosumnes River. Today's bridge looks a bit like the Mira Paradis Drive Bridge that we studied last week (due south of today's bridge). However that arch bridge was older, longer, and it had been turned into a pedestrian bridge.

Today's bridge narrows to a single lane and so you have to stop and make sure no one is coming before you hit the gas. Still, Buck's Bar Road Bridge is pretty busy (over 4000 vehicles a day). It's like several other arch bridges in El Dorado County (including Mira Paradis). It has a rubble-filled retaining wall, but the other three walls are plain reinforcing concrete.

The Buck's Bar Road Bridge is 19 ft wide and 70 ft long and it's an open spandrel arch built in 1940. The approaches are on retained fill and the arch supports are on bedrock on either side of the North Fork of Cosumnes River.

We'll take another look at this bridge tomorrow.

El Dorado County, California Bridges: Buck's Bar Road Bridge across the North Fork of the Cosumnes River (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.