Calaveras County, California Bridges: New Melones Bridge across the Stanislaus River (2)

September 2005 (38.00667 Degrees, -120.49833 Degrees) New Melones Bridge

A closer look at the New Melones Bridge from some photos I took in September of 2005. You can clearly see the two steel box girder spans with a hinge (hanger) at mid-span. This is the end of the dry season in California and so the grass is brown and the reservoir is very shallow.

A good website with many more photos of this bridge is Eric Sakowski's HighestBridges.com. Eric calls this bridge by its official name, the Archie Stevenot Bridge. Archie was an important citizen of Calaveras County in the early 20th century and helped create State Route 49 and so this bridge was named after him.

Eric writes that the tallest pier is 400 ft tall (above the bottom of the reservoir) which makes it almost as high as the Foresthill Bridge. Eric includes photos during construction and before the dam was completed, which shows just how tall this bridge really is.

Calaveras County, California Bridges: New Melones Bridge across the Stanislaus River (2) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.