El Dorado County, California Bridges: North South Road Bridges across the Middle Fork of the Cosumnes River (3)

March 2013 (38.56667 Degrees, -120. 44242 Degrees) PiPi Bridges

Next to the elaborate PiPi Pedestrian Bridge is a single span precast girder highway bridge. A sign says it is the Glenn Oviatt Bridge but I couldn't find out who he was although I assume he was someone important to the region. These bridges are in the PiPi Valley, which provides some flat terrain in the middle of the towering Sierra Nevada Mountains.

The wingwall on the north side of the Glenn Oviatt Bridge provides the bridge's construction date as 1998. A shear key on the seat-type abutment beside the wingwall looks like it was broken, perhaps due to a recent earthquake. There are normal faults all along the Sierras east of this bridge.

This completes our study of the bridges across the Middle Fork of the Cosumnes River. There were only five bridges across a fifty mile long river: the two bridges at Mt Aukum Road, the Rocky Bar Road Bridge which is difficult to cross because the road isn't maintained, and the two PiPi Bridges that are closed during the winter. Perhaps this is typical for bridges in mountainous regions?

El Dorado County, California Bridges: North South Road Bridges across the Middle Fork of the Cosumnes River (3) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.