West Ridge Bridge Construction
Building Bridges & Crossing Creeks
Have you ever been walking on a trail and asked yourself “Why haven’t they built a bridge here?” If you have you’d better keep reading because it is not as easy as you would think!
The West Ridge Trail is a very popular trail for mountain bikers and hikers. The trail connects you from the Keystone Gulch area onto Segment 6 of the Colorado Trail. It was very well known that at the start of the trail there was a rickety user-built bridge that most people were afraid to cross. Due to this, USFS established that there was a need for a new bridge to be built that was up to USFS specifications.
What Next?
That’s when FDRD came in. In the fall of 2023, FDRD and the USFS began scouting the bridge location. During that scout we decided that the length and type of bridge to create the creek crossing would be a 20′ puncheon bridge. We also noticed that the immediate areas surrounding the bridge were consistently muddy and it was decided to extend the turnpike approach to the bridge on the south side to help make the trail more sustainable. We took measurements, notes and created rough sketches of the bridge and bridge approaches to have a solid game plan before we began construction. But where would the money for the bridge come from? The rest of the fall of 2023 was spent applying for grants to fund the bridge construction. FDRD was awarded a grant from Legacy Trails and with the crucial funding secured, the materials for the bridge were ordered arriving just in time for our summer 2024 project.
The month before we broke ground, the USFS and FDRD went out to finalize construction plans and visualize the bridge by laying the bridge out with flagging.
Behind the scenes FDRD and USFS transported and staged lumber at the bridge site. A couple days before the first project FDRD and the USFS dug out and set the sills. It is always a bit of trial and error when setting sills because they are the anchor points of the bridge to the ground. Therefore, you have to make sure that they are perfectly level, square, and the correct distance away from each other.
We had a total of 5 volunteer projects over the month of August working on the bridge. Participating partners included VNTR Birds, Breckenridge Mountain Rotary, Rotary Club of Summit County, Summit Economic Partnership, and Summit SOL.
During the first project we attached the stringers to the sills with rebar. The next two projects we attached the decking and started working on the approaches.
A bridge approach is essentially a ramp on either side of the bridge that gradually elevates the trail tread to the height of the bridge. Approaches eliminate the need for hikers and mountain bikers to step up onto the bridge and guides trail users in the right direction.
In order to build them we had to dig trenches for the approach stringers to sit in and rebar to secure in place. To make them level with the existing trail we had to stack approach stringers on top of one another. The south side approach was 18ft length and the north side approach was 12 ft total, and both were 4 ft wide, so if you could imagine it would take a lot of rock to fill those in!
During the final two projects we attached the bull rail onto the bridge and finished the approaches. Meanwhile, the rest of us were sourcing and hauling a lot of dirt and rock to fill in the approaches.
The finished product! After over a year of work the new bridge was built. Thank you to all our volunteers and project partners who made this possible and for countless hours of hauling dirt & rock and pounding rebar!
