Fire Destroys Historic Dewey Bridge, Gateway to Canyonlands
April 2008Dewey Bridge in flames.
The Dewey Bridge, a 1916 bridge over the Colorado River in southeastern Utah, has been destroyed in a brush fire, apparently started by a child playing with matches. Until 1988, the single-lane wooden bridge was the only way across the Colorado along the River Road (Highway 128) between I-70 and Moab. Once the new highway bridge was constructed a few hundred feet away, the Dewey Bridge was still used as a footbridge and by mountain bikers on the Kokopelli Trail. The bridge even gave its name to a layer of hard yet crumbling sandstone found beneath the Entrada layer on Echo and Aeolian pinnacles, and in other parts of Canyonlands.
The bridge had profound sentimental value for many climbers. When you left the highway and drove down through the sagebrush flats and then crossed the bridge over the Colorado, it meant you’d finally entered Canyon Country, and great adventures were about to begin. In the days when Dewey Bridge was the only way across the river, camping was still free and sparsely populated along the River Road; many of the storefronts in Moab were boarded up for the winter; and you were likely to know anyone you encountered on Castleton Tower.
Colorado Springs climber Stewart Green sent a beautiful e-mail to the Out There blog, reflecting on the bridge’s passing:
"Ed Webster and I just drove past the Dewey Bridge a week ago, en route to Moab and the canyon country, and talked about how crossing the old bridge in the 70s was the magical entry point to the desert and all those sandstone cracks and towers. Ed remembered driving across it for the first time in Jim Dunn's old Youth Challenge VW bus in 1976, on the way to climb the first ascent of Supercrack. It was well after nightfall below a sky filled with stars. Jim stopped the bus in the middle of the bridge above the torrent, and Jim, Ed, and Bryan Becker stepped out onto the creaky wood planks. Funny, I said, Jim and I did the same thing in 1971 on our first climbing trip to Utah. After that, I always stopped at night when I drove across the old bridge going either to or from the Canyonlands, hands sore from jamming cracks, hair full of desert sand and grit, listening to the river currents sweeping below like a strong black god. I'm gonna miss that old bridge and what it meant."
That pioneering era of desert climbing is long past. And to many of us, the bridge's destruction now seems as much a final signal of that passing as it was a beacon to travelers for generations.
—Dougald MacDonald