Sacramento County, California Bridges: Rancho Murieta Footbridge across the Cosumnes River (1)

March 2013 (38.49477 Degrees, -121.08421 Degrees) Cosumnes River Bridge

The most interesting of the three bridges that cross the Cosumnes River in Rancho Murieta is this new timber bowstring truss pedestrian bridge.  I first saw it looking upstream from the State Route 16 Bridge, but I couldn't figure out how to get to it, since it's inside a gated community. I was thinking about kayaking down the Cosumnes River to photograph it when my wife suggested that we should just drive up to the entrance to Rancho Murieta and ask if we could photograph the bridge.

As I've often mentioned, truss bridges are seldom built nowadays, but this is a nice contemporary truss bridge and it looks especially nice in wood. The bridge was designed by Western Wood Structures and engineered by Quincy Engineering. Western Wood specializes in big, Glulam structures and Quincy Engineering is made up almost entirely of former Caltrans bridge engineers.

We'll take a closer look at this interesting bridge tomorrow.

Sacramento County, California Bridges: Rancho Murieta Footbridge across the Cosumnes River (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.