Santa Cruz County, California Bridges: Bear Creek Road across the San Lorenzo River

March 2014 (37.12778, -122.12194) Bear Creek Road Bridge

The town of Boulder Creek is located where several tributaries join the San Lorenzo River. I stopped to look at a few of the bridges in town.  Today's bridge carries Bear Creek Road across the San Lorenzo River. The Bear Creek Road Bridge (36C0084) is a 174 ft long 3-span steel stringer bridge with a 70 ft long center span. The San Lorenzo River has cut a narrow canyon at the bridge site and so the bridge is supported on tall, two column bents.

This is a county bridge, but it appears that bridge construction for both state and county bridges changed from concrete arch to steel and precast I girder bridges in the 1940s and 1950s. 

Bear Creek Road is surrounded by residences and it's so densely forested that I couldn't see the bridge on Google earth. It carries traffic between SR 9 and SR 17 through mountainous terrain.

Santa Cruz County, California Bridges: Bear Creek Road across the San Lorenzo River by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.