Dubious Water Crossings on the Wonderland Trail

On day 3 I had to cross MANY “bridges” that I deemed ‘sketchy’. Most of these bridges were logs that had been smoothed on one side with a railing bolted on. But sometimes the railing was broken, or loose, or leaned so far away that I couldn’t reach it, or sometimes the whole log had rolled a bit and now was at an angle. I am NOT a fan of these things. I’m not a fan of heights and I don’t trust my balance as much as I did when I was younger.

I eventually came up with a rating system of ‘banana peels’ to describe how likely I thought it was that I would plunge off of one to my death. Here is the moment that inspired the rating system, but I want to note that this was not the scariest bridge I crossed this day. That honor went to the broken slanted log we crossed before I started documenting them. I had to scoot across that one on my butt.

THE RATING SYSTEM
One banana peel.   This is a solid bridge.  It’s wide, flat, no rotten boards.  You’d feel comfortable letting someone pass. You can hang out here and take photos.  I would walk backwards across this bridge.

Two banana peels.  Still a solid bridge.  It’s comfortable to walk across and stop on.  It might not be wide enough for passing, or, if it’s a wide bridge, maybe there are some rotten boards you need to watch out for.

Three banana peels.  There’s something not great about this bridge.  Is it missing a handrail when it needs one?  Is it too narrow?  It’s slanted at an uncomfortable angle.  Maybe it’s very high and narrow, or it moves a bit.  I’ll still walk across it at a normal pace but there’s something about it to give me pause.

Four banana peels.  Something has gone seriously wrong here.  Who built this thing? I’m walking sideways or slide-stepping to cross this.  It’s wet and narrow, or there’s a vertigo-inducing whirling cataract below it and it moves. Multiple points of failure. 

Five banana peels.  How has it come to this?  I’m questioning my life choices that have led me down this path. I’ll still cross it, slowly, but I’m muttering obscenities, or curses, or prayers.

Six banana peels. This is probably not a bridge but something that has to be crossed anyway.  It’s a rotten, slanted, broken log.  Bonus if it’s wet.  It’s a stack of slippery logs over a raging torrent.  I’m not walking on it.  If it must be crossed I’m crawling or scooting on my butt.

Since the bank of the Carbon river seemed to be crumbling there were something like 6 bridges over parts of it even after we’d crossed the main bridge. I didn’t take pictures of them all but some of the bridge designs were quite unique.

Now that’ I had a rating system I started to pay more attention to other bridges as we came to them.

Here are some very safe 1-banana peel bridges

These are all in the 2-3 Banana Peel Category. Nothing too terrifying, but I had to steel myself for a few.

I should have taken better notes. I know that some bridges turned out to be not as scary as they looked, and some that looked safe in the photo felt terrifying when I was there. Clearly I have to go back. But here are two standouts.

The Tahoma Creek Suspension Bridge is where I gave everyone a scare. It was really high and narrow and there was a sign saying only one person at a time. I asked to go first on the theory that I’d get it over with and could take pictures of everyone else crossing. What happened: I got about 30 feet out and stopped abruptly and my friends thought maybe I was starting to panic. What happened was I stepped out of the shelter of the canyon wall and was suddenly in high winds which started to blow my hat off. I had to stop and I stuck the string from my hat in my mouth so I could keep going. I rate it a 3 banana peel.

This atrocity. I think this was the crossing of the Kautz Creek (it may have been Pyramid) just before Longmire. The creek had a shallow spot and if I’d really wanted to avoid it I could have put on my sandals and waded across, but S threw down the gauntlet by scouting upstream a little to find this not-a-bridge, pile of wet logs that she hopped over to cross. What you can’t see is that she tried to use a stick to brace in the water and the stick almost vanished because that little bit of creek is both fast and easily 3 feet deep. I got across it by putting my feet on the lower log, the one in the water, my hands on the upper one and crab-walking over it. My feet got a little wet. 6 banana peels.