Alaska's Bridges: Gakona Bridge (2)

December 2002 Gakona Bridge  (lat. 62.301·, long. -145.307·) Tok Cut-Off Road

Alaska's Bridges:: Gakona Bridge (2) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Ecuador's Bridges: Puente Rio Sandima (1)

Let's study one last bridge by Walter Yanez.  To get to Puente Rio Sandima we drove on a dirt road into a rich agricultural region.  A woman charges a small toll to go down this road.  Walter said that he build the single-span, pony truss superstructure and that someone else built the abutments.  The superstructure was brought in by truck and placed on steel plate bearings on the abutment seats.  The bridge is about 12 meters long and about 3 meters wide. It has a steel riding surface and it was the only one of Walter’s bridges that I saw that was designed for light truck traffic.   Note that the deck has a textured surface as well as long slots to promote drainage.


Walter is a really hard worker and he is very proud of his bridges. That's Walter in the photo standing with his hand on his hip. He's traveled throughout Latin America, sometimes with his friend Toni Ruttimann and sometimes on his own, building bridges. Some of his bridges we're built after disasters like floods and some were built to help the rural poor. 

Ecuador's Bridges: Puente Rio Sandima (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.