First time I've seen a covered bridge

Up in the mountainous former goldrush land of Nevada County, Northern California I had a chance to visit a different type of toll bridge – the Bridgeport covered bridge which in its heyday used to charge 1$ per horse and 50 cents per rider to cross above the fast-running Yuba river.

Built in 1862, it qualifies as a Historic Civil Engineering Landmark  designated by the American Society of Civil Engineers. It uses a Howe Through-truss design  and is one of the longest of the covered bridges still existing in the US.

Gold-panning is permitted in the Yuba river although given the powerful current on the day due to melting snows upstream I didn’t try my luck.

Certainly not the first Irishman to trudge through the Yuba River valley, now preserved as a National Park, I naturally enough found myself humming the old Irish tune Mursheen Durken

“As sure as me name is Kearney,

I’ll be off to California

an’ instead of diggin’ praties

I’ll be digging lumps of gold”

The classic 1968 Dubliners version can be found on Youtube and I had the pleasure of accompanying Dubliner Ronnie Drew on guitar as he sang this in cabaret back in the 80’s in Cork city when he was touring as a solo act.

One also needs to be on the look-out for wandering mountain lions and for poison oak around these parts apparently – didn’t see any of the former and carefully avoided the latter! 

Golden Gate vs. 25 April

While at a technology management conference in San José, California I took the opportunity to visit San Francisco.  It was interesting to compare its bridge with the Lisbon one I have been crossing regularly over the last 22 years (see earlier post for comments on Sydney bridge).

The Golden Gate suspension bridge with a span of 1,280 metres is said to have the 9^th longest span in the world for this type of structure while Lisbon’s 25 April bridge with a span of 1,013 metres comes in at number 21.

There have been some cases of suicide over the years on the 25 April even though it does not allow pedestrians to cross. The Californian bridge does allow pedestrians – albeit with a helpline for the suicidal.

Cyclists too!

Two other points of difference:

There doesn’t appear to be a permanent separation between the incoming and outgoing traffic lanes as we have in Lisbon. I assume this is to give flexibility in lane assignation in periods of high one-way traffic, but it does assume a high quality of driving discipline on the part of users.

On both bridges the toll is paid only on city entry but the Californian predominantly manual cash collection system seems much slower than the Lisbon version which has been largely automatic using the Via Verde RFID-based system for many years.

Update 1 (2013)

There were 2 separate incidents involving teenagers surviving falls from the bridge in 2011. One of these was a suicide attempt while the other is believed to have been a stunt. There has been an average of 25 suicides per year from the bridge with a total of 12,000 deaths since the bridge opened. A controversial film, The Bridge, recorded the leaps of 24 of these in 2004. The bridge is 60 m above water level (the Lisbon 25 April bridge is 70 m)

Update 2 (2013)

Tollbooths were discontinued in March 2013 in favour of an electronic system that photographs licence plates. 

Two things learnt in Jordan

While in Jordan for the EDUCON 2011 conference we got a chance to visit Petra and Wadi Rum desert.

  1) At Petra I was intrigued to see the series of rectangular marks either side of the carved entrance to the Treasury. According to our guide Isam, they were the locations of the scaffold used by the artisans to carve the intricate designs higher up on the structure. As the lower part didn’t have this kind of detail they were not necessary there (click picture for a better view).

2) In both the Arab script (here in a carving of T E Lawrence in Wadi Rum) and the ancient pictograms of Bedouin (also in Wadi Rum) the script is right to left. Apparently early written languages (Sumerian, Arabic etc) were right to left because they were carved in stone and this was easier from R to L with early writing instruments. 

When writing with ink on papyrus in Egypt and parchment in Greece became more common, L to R was more convenient. In fact Greek started out R to L and later changed over and this in turn gave rise to Latin and other modern European scripts.