Royal Gorge Bridge: The Canyon and the Crossing

The Arkansas River carved the Royal Gorge over millions of years, cutting a slot through the Precambrian granite of the Wet Mountains that drops more than a thousand feet below the canyon rim. The walls close to barely fifty feet apart at the narrowest point while the river at the bottom roars through boulders in near-continuous whitewater. It is one of the deepest canyons in North America, and for most of human history it was simply impassable.

The canyon entered railroad history in eighteen seventy-eight, when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad both tried to build through it simultaneously. The gorge was the only practical route to the silver mines at Leadville, and the two companies fought what became known as the Royal Gorge War: legal battles, sabotage, armed standoffs between crews. The Rio Grande eventually won the right to build through the gorge by court order, and the two railroads settled by agreement, with the Rio Grande paying the Santa Fe for the grading work it had already done. The narrow-gauge railroad that threaded the canyon walls below is still operating today as a heritage railroad.

The suspension bridge came forty years later. The Royal Gorge Bridge opened in December of nineteen twenty-nine, designed by the engineer George Cole and built by the Royal Gorge Company, a private concern that operated it as a tourist attraction from the beginning. At its opening, it was the highest suspension bridge in the world, suspended nine hundred fifty-five feet above the Arkansas River. It held that record for decades.

The bridge deck's main span is about eight hundred eighty feet long, supported by cables anchored in concrete buttresses on both canyon rims. Crossing it on foot, the deck sways slightly in the wind and the canyon bottom is an almost abstract distance below. Two hundred sixteen vertical cables hold the roadway. On each side of the bridge, incline railways carry visitors to the canyon floor.

In June of two thousand thirteen, a wildfire swept through the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park, destroying thirty of forty-eight structures in the attraction. The bridge itself survived. It reopened in two thousand fourteen.