Nevada County, California Bridges: Pine Street Bridge across Deer Creek (1)

December 2012 (39.2609 Degrees, -121.0193 Degrees) Pine Street Bridge

A few miles north of the Banner Ridge Road Bridge is Nevada City and the Pine Street (or Gault) Bridge. I had the hardest time getting a good view of this bridge. The Victorian homes around Deer Creek have well-built fences that prevented me from walking to the river bank and photographing the bridge. The above photo was taken from State Route 49 which is a little downstream. After wasting an hour trying to gain access to the river, I saw a locked gate for state maintenance engineers to inspect the Route 49 Bridge and I remembered that I had a key. It was a long walk along the river bank from SR-49 to the Pine Street Bridge. The vegetation was dense and every plant had thorns that tore at my clothes and scratched my hands. When I finally got close enough to see the bridge, I was too close to get it into a single photo.

I'm still not sure if this is a new or an old bridge. A placard on the barrier rail said that it was built in 1996 and that it's a replica of a 1903 single span arch bridge that was built on this site. However, the usually reliable Bridgehunter wrote that the bridge was simply reconditioned in 1996. The Bridgehunter goes on to say that this is the oldest surviving three hinge steel arch bridge in California.

We'll take a closer look tomorrow and see if we can figure out whether it is a new or an old bridge.

Nevada County, California Bridges: Pine Street Bridge across Deer Creek (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.