It had a shady past, enjoyed a vibrant mid-life, and now faces an uncertain
future.

The Arrah Wanna Bridge – of steel pony truss design – yawns across the
Salmon River south of Hwy. 26. But despite its eligibility for the National
Register of Historic Places, its days are numbered.

Enter Bob Thurman, of Welches, who has his eye on saving the local icon, at
least some of its parts.

“This community has a resource,” Thurman said, referring to the bridge. “I
just don’t want it sent to India or Japan.”

According to Joel Howie, a civil engineering supervisor of the Clackamas
County Department of Transportation, the Arrah Wanna Bridge is coming
down this fall and construction of a new bridge will begin soon after.

The bridge is too narrow, and can’t seem to carry the weight of modern times.
It seems the old girl is obsolete.

She is one of the earliest steel thru-truss bridges still remaining in the county.

It is unknown when the bridge was built, as, with a dose of irony, records of
the early 1900s were destroyed by flood inundation.

What is known is it was moved to its present site in 1957 as part of a program
of adaptive bridge component reuse in which the steel pony truss was a
favored bridge type to be relocated to new settings.

When the Arrah Wanna Bridge was fostered to the Salmon River crossing,
engineers simply deployed its truss components on new concrete abutments
to form a 16-foot-wide span with an overall length of 117 feet. As a result,
given the constraints of this reused superstructure, a 15-foot wide roadway
was all the bridge builders could provide.

The current crossing replaced a wood Howe truss bridge built in 1940.
The historical significance of the bridge is owed to a combination of its historic
earlier life and in its adaptive reuse.

Thurman, who owns some of the property along Hwy. 26 from the Wemme
sign to Wildwood Park, wants to save the trusses and set them along a
pathway extension of the trail that now runs from Woodsey Way to Arrah
Wanna.

“It would be a symbolic reference to our past, and our future,” Thurman
said. “It is in our own backyard and is eligible for historic reference.
Recycling, reuse and repurposing are important (to our community).”
Thurman’s path extension concept would allow public access to Wildwood Park
that only exists now by automobile, and he would like it to be an interpretive
walkway.

Thurman has contacted the Oregon Department of Transportation about
preserving the historical truss for the Mountain community.

Howie responded to Thurman saying that ODOT “will be advertising a public
notice for interest and proposals from interested parties for the bridge location
next summer.”

Thurman told The Mountain Times: “Our hope is to meet in January 2011 with
Howie in Oregon City” to discuss the possibility of keeping the trusses intact
and reusing them along Hwy. 26.

In the meantime the venerable Arrah Wanna Bridge lives out her last days,
sturdy against the blast of winter, and still the 54-year-old guardian of the
wild river that rocks along under her bed.