Sacramento County, California Bridges: Rancho Murieta Footbridge across the Cosumnes River (2)

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

Another view of the Cosumnes River Footbridge. The exterior concrete is faced with rounded river stones. I wonder if they glued facing stones to the formwork or placed them after the concrete hardened?

The bridge is a nice combination of structural steel for the vertical members over the supports and the connecting hardware, glulam wood for the other truss elements, and stone faced reinforced concrete for the retaining walls, abutments, and piers.

What makes this bridge so impressive is that the glulam effortlessly bends upward to form the top chord of the bowstring truss. Talking to the residents at Rancho Murieta, they all expressed impatience at how long the bridge took to get built and satisfaction with how nice the finished product was.

Rancho Murieta is pleasant but slightly cultish because the relaxed lifestyle the residents enjoy is separated from the rest of the world. We'll take a closer look at their bridge tomorrow.

Sacramento County, California Bridges: Rancho Murieta Footbridge across the Cosumnes River (2) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.