Thomas Creek Bridge

The Thomas Creek Bridge is a bridge located in Curry County, Oregon, just north of the city of Brookings. The bridge is an automobile bridge that carries US Highway 101 over Thomas Creek. It was designed by Ivan D Merchant and opened in 1961, and allowed a shortening and realignment of Highway 101 closer to the coast, cutting out a detour it had to make into the hills north of Brookings.

The bridge's construction is a metal truss design, with two steel towers supporting a steel truss and deck. From the viewpoint of a driver on the bridge, there is nothing too interesting: there are no arches or cables that announce this is a bridge. The span of the bridge is not too long, with a total length a little under 1000 feet. But this bridge has an important record: it is the highest bridge in Oregon, at 345 feet. When viewed from below, or even slightly off of the deck, the bridge is dizzingly tall, and for the acrophobic, precarious looking. It is a little bit hard to explain what 345 feet of height looks like, so the best comparison is that such famous bridges as the Golden Gate Bridge and Verrazanno-Narrows Bridge are about 220 feet in height, so this bridge is more than 50% taller than that. Along with being the tallest bridges in Oregon, it is also the 33rd tallest bridges in the United States. This is somewhat surprising, because Oregon has many famous rivers and mountains, but the title for tallest bridge is not in them, but in a hilly region of the coast range in a relatively unpopulated part of the state. And Thomas Creek itself is a small stream: less than 2.5 linear miles from origin to mouth. But in the rocky and rainy terrain of the southern Oregon Coast, it forms a steep canyon.

It is also interesting to me how much impressive engineering---along with time, money and effort---go into making infrastructure that then becomes transparent to the people who use it. For people driving on the bridge, it is not apparent just how dramatic the landscape and structure are. Once I visited the bridge and hiked down just a little to see the towers, I never took it for granted again, and honestly, felt a little scared anytime I rode over the bridge.