Dale Creek Bridge: The Spider Bridge of the Iron Road

Crossing Dale Creek was one of the biggest problems the Union Pacific faced while building the first transcontinental railroad. The creek carved a gully one hundred fifty feet deep out here on the Wyoming high plains, and the rails had to cross it. Workers built a wooden trestle seven hundred twenty feet long, completed in just eighty-five days in eighteen sixty-eight.

The whole structure swayed in the wind. When the first train crossed on April twenty-third, eighteen sixty-eight, passengers gripped their seats. A traveler who crossed in eighteen seventy-three later wrote that the bridge looked like a light, frail thing to bear so great a weight, and that the fierce mountain winds made the experience not for the faint of heart.

Locals called it the Spider Bridge for its web-like tangle of timber beams. In eighteen seventy-six the wooden trestle was replaced with an iron span. By nineteen oh one, the railroad had rerouted over Sherman Hill entirely, and the Spider Bridge was taken down.

Nothing remains today except the grade and the story.