Umtanum Creek Footbridge

Yakima Canyon, where the Yakima River traverses a water gap through Manastash Ridge, is an obvious thoroughfare and was used by Native Americans for thousands of years, and then by Euro-American trappers and settlers into the 19th century. It was also an obvious route for a railroad, and the Northern Pacific Railway was built through it in the early 1880s, along the west bank of the river. (The railroad is still in active use and is now part of the BNSF system.)

Railroading was an extremely labor-intensive business well into the 20th century, and camps were built along the right-of-way to house the trackwalkers, signal men, section gangs, and other workers. In 1885 one such camp was built here at Umtanum Creek, where the eponymous creek joins the Yakima. The camp even boasted a school and a post office by the early 20th century.

When in 1925 the automobile highway was built through the canyon on the east shore of the river, cable suspension bridges were built across the river from the railroad camps to provide highway access. Evidently the original bridges were wide enough to be passable to Ford Model A’s. In the 1960s, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Bureau of Land Management took over the day-to-day management of the bridge, but only in 1987 was the bridge deck narrowed to make it accessible to pedestrians only.

With the continuing rise of automotive travel it proved no longer necessary to station crews on the railroad right-of-way, and by the 1970s the last of the camps had been removed.

The cable suspension bridges were also removed, with the sole exception of the Umtanum Creek bridge. It was still used by recreational users to access the west side of the river, but because of age-related deterioration concerns were being raised about its safety. Meanwhile, efforts were underway to have the bridge declared a national historic site. Finally, Umtanum Creek Bridge was restored in early 2021, with attention paid to preserving the structure’s historic values.