As the National Park Service prepares to close most of the roads in Yellowstone National Park for the winter season, the new Yellowstone River Bridge is reaching a crucial milestone.
Steel beams are being installed across the 1,285-foot expanse. That brings the project closer to its November 2026 target, but traffic will cross the bridge before that.
“All the steel girders are on site,” Daniel Rhodes, a landscape architect with Facility Management and Operations in Yellowstone, said in an interview with Cowboy State Daily. “Weather permitting, we hope to have them all set right before Thanksgiving.”
The existing bridge is 604 feet-long, while the new bridge is 1,285 feet-long and sits 180 feet above the river.
Making the new bridge taller was an easier, safer and less intrusive option for the road corridor, according to Rhodes.
“The pillars allow the bridge deck to be up to the top of the Yellowstone River Canyon,” Rhodes said. “This minimized the excavation we had to do on each side of the bridge. The old bridge drops down the steep grade on both approaches. The new design was done to keep the grades level.”
The Yellowstone River Bridge project is one of the most expensive construction projects in Yellowstone’s history with a price tag of $118 million.
Funding will be available thanks to the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act. The act allocates funding to address the maintenance backlog in national parks.
Source: Cowboy State Daily, The Associated Press
