Skokomish High Steel Bridge 10-17-2014

Day 2, Part 2

After a failed visit to the Elwha River dam site, we set out to locate the 'High Steel Bridge'.

Honestly, it's not clear how, why or when the 'High Steel Bridge' came to my attention, but it immediately captured my interest.

Whatever or wherever I first saw pictures of it we may never know.  My first impressions were that this was a railroad bridge which was somewhere in the middle of nowhere.  It appeared potentially run down... maybe totally forgotten about.  Possibly just a leftover of prior times, now unclaimed and almost forgotten.  The 'mystery' of this location, this relic, had the same kind of feeling that I had when I first found Dirty Harry's Museum back in 2007.

Then, in a complete coincidence, while we were discussing the itinerary for this weekend outing (less than 12 hours prior to my departure from home) my Dad mentioned something about a really high steel bridge that maybe we should try to find.  ***Connection!***

We quickly agreed that we were thinking about the same structure and added it to our to-do list.  Luckily, he knew a little more about it than just 'high steel bridge'.  With the help of Google Maps we were able to locate the structure and backtrack the roads to civilization.

Since the weather had turned 'significantly wet' we were pretty glad to learn the road would take us all the way to the bridge.  It wasn't clear what we would find when we arrived... would we have to park and hike an abandoned railroad route to get there?  Would we be able to drive right to it and drive over it?  We didn't know.

Long story short... yes, the road goes directly to the bridge and yes you can drive over it.  You can drive beyond it but honestly I have no idea where the road goes.

We parked the truck and walked across the bridge and then walked back.  Then we drove over the bridge and then drove over it again.  We survived.

The views are pretty impressive but the moody weather wasn't very helpful in getting photos - it was raining buckets.

Here are the photos I could salvage.  They are a bit blurry... let's just say that adds character to them.

I accidently deleted the gps route to get here, but admittedly, half the fun was figuring out which route to take to get here.  So, instead of trying to piece that info together for you... you'll get a kick out of trying to find it yourself.  :)

Stay tuned for the final destination of this awesome weekend:  Fudge Point

Happy Hiking!

~E