Hell's Backbone Bridge
Near Escalante, Utah
Before Highway Twelve, there was Hell's Backbone. In the early years, no automobile road connected Escalante and Boulder at all, only wagon ruts and mule trails threading the cliffs. Boulder was so isolated that it clung to the mule train longer than almost anywhere in the country.
That changed in the nineteen thirties, when crews of the Civilian Conservation Corps completed a daring gravel road across the high country between the two towns, opening them to cars for the first time. The road's most heart stopping point is Hell's Backbone Bridge, a span about one hundred nine feet long that leaps across a chasm with sheer drops of some fifteen hundred feet plunging away on either side. From the bridge you look out over the rugged Box Death Hollow Wilderness, a maze of deep sandstone gorges.
The original bridge was a heavy timber structure built from local pine by the same Depression era crews, and it served for more than seventy years before it was replaced with the current steel and concrete span in two thousand five. The Corps workers who carved this route had a grimly affectionate name for its narrowest ledges. One false step, they said, and down you go.
Today the thirty eight mile gravel road remains a rough, thrilling alternative to the paved highway, open only in the warmer months, and a monument to the sweat that finally ended Boulder's long isolation.
