Historic Dewey Bridge Burns

The Dewey Bridge burned through the night of April 6. Photo courtesy Grand County Sheriff Department

It’s with great sadness that I report the passing of the Dewey Bridge, an old single-lane bridge that spanned the Colorado River near Arches National Park and Moab, Utah. On Sunday night, April 6, the 1916 wooden plank bridge, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, burned in a brush fire started by a 7-year-old boy playing with matches in a campsite just up-river from the bridge. The bridge, the second longest suspension bridge west of the Mississippi River when it was built, was still Utah’s longest suspension bridge. It was replaced by a modern bridge in the early 1980s and closed to auto traffic for its preservation.

Just a few days before it burned, Ed Webster and I drove past the Dewey Bridge on the new bridge, en route to Moab and the canyon country, and talked about how crossing the old bridge in the 1970s was the magical entry point to the Utah desert and all its sandstone cracks and towers. Ed remembered driving across it for the first time in Jim Dunn's old Youth Challenge VW bus in 1976, on the way to climb the first ascent of “Supercrack.” It was well after nightfall below a sky filled with stars. Jim stopped the bus in the middle of the bridge above the torrent and Jim, Ed and Bryan Becker stepped out onto the creaky wood planks.

Funny, I said, Jim and I did the same thing in 1971 on our first climbing trip to Utah. After that, I always stopped at night when I drove across the old bridge going either to or from the canyonlands from my Colorado Springs’ home, hands sore from jamming cracks, hair full of desert sand and grit, listening to the river currents sweeping below like a strong black god.

I'm gonna miss that old bridge and what it meant. The Dewey’s destruction was needless. I just ask: Where were the parents?