Colorado Green Bridge

This week, our travel-pic theme is X for Xerox – black-and-white reproductions of some pics we’ve taken around the world.

Today, a serendipitous structure captured through a car window.

We should never have seen this bridge … it wasn’t on our proposed route from Granby Colorado to Taos, New Mexico.

But just after we had gone through Silverthorne we came across a bad traffic accident – which completely blocked the highway, and forced us to detail through Vail, and on a side-trip of some hundred kilometres or so.

It was actually quite interesting – we hadn’t, at that stage, intended travelling any great distance on America’s Interstate highway system .. but found ourselves forced to take Interstate 70 west for about 60km … and it was fascinating.

These are highways on steroids – big, wide, fast, and efficient – but you are so busy driving at 70mph+ (120km/hr) and watching for a squillion trucks around you that you don’t have time to check the view.

But then we turned south again on highway 24 – and started seeing sights like this.

The bridge over the Eagle River at Colorado wasn’t something we were expecting to see – but as we came around a sweeping curve, there it was.

Shirley quickly snapped this pic out the car window, as we marveled at its construction – a cantilevered bridge built in 1940, over a 60 metre drop.

Apparently the construction crew were hauled up to the scaffolding in temps that dropped to freezing or below – and then spent their days up there in bitterly cold winds building one of only two steel arch bridges in the entire state.

The bridge is just outside the town of Red Cliff – so that makes it a Green Bridge, at Red Cliff, in a state named after the Colour red .. and yet our pic is black and white 🙂