The Chances

BOY you guys are gonna love this story.

On Tuesday I drove out to the Foresthill Bridge in Auburn, CA. This is the 3rd highest bridge in the US, and the 9th highest in the world. It also has a story behind it. Back in the 70s, the plan was to build the Auburn Dam, and along with that plan, they were going to flood a canyon. They built this bridge across the canyon with the anticipation of the dam. Water would have flooded the canyon, and the bridge would only be about 100 feet above it.

Well, the dam never happened. In the meantime, you now have a 730-foot-high bridge that spans a half-mile, only 16 feet shorter than the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

Mainly I went out there for location scouting, for a potential ad for the company I work for. "Bridging the Logistics Gap" is what I'm calling it.

These pictures really don't show the scope of the bridge. The thing's a monster.

On either side of the bridge and in the middle are those little phone kiosks, like the ones you see on the side of the road when your car breaks down. These, however, are set up to dial directly to Suicide Prevention. The sign in this one reads, "CRISIS COUNSELING, THERE IS HOPE, MAKE THE CALL 1. OPEN PHONE BOX, 2. LIFT THE HANDSET, 3. PUSH THE BUTTON".

Now for the fun part.

At the end of my time at the bridge, I decided to walk across it and walk back. As I got a little ways in, my phone rang, so I put my tripod on the ledge. It's a good thing I hadn't walked very far across.

The arrow is pointing to the part of the bridge where I knocked the tripod off the ledge. It's a good thing the camera wasn't attached, because it fell maybe 150 to 200 feet down. I ended up climbing down that hill for the third time to retrieve it, and luckily it still works. A bit of plastic is now broken off, and there's dirt lodged in places I can't get to. Battle scars.