Shasta County, California Bridges: Pit River Bridge (2)

April 2015 (40.7601 Degrees, -122.3182 Degrees) Pit River Bridge

We drove north from Redding to look at the bridges around Lake Shasta. We had previously studied the Pit River Bridge a couple of weeks ago. It's unusual because it carries a highway on the top deck and a railway on the bottom deck. It was built by the US Bureau of Reclamation as part of the Shasta Dam Project and given to California's Division of Water Resources (DWR) to maintain. The DWR would like to give it to Caltrans.

Dams are controversial because of their negative effect on the people (and animals) whose homes are near the river. Every river coming out of the Sierras in California has been dammed except for the Smith River near the northern border.

Eric Sakowski wrote that the Pit River Bridge would be the tallest railroad bridge in the U.S. if you measured from the riverbed. The bridge is in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest and Recreation Area. When we drove down a one-lane dirt road to take this photo we saw many people hiking, picnicking, and enjoying the near wilderness.

Shasta County, California Bridges: Pit River Bridge (2) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.