Engineering Stop of the Day: Chevelon Creek Bridge – near Winslow, Arizona

If you enjoy stumbling across forgotten infrastructure, the Chevelon Creek Bridge is a small but elegant example of early highway engineering in the American Southwest.

Built in 1912–1913, the bridge is a Warren pony-truss steel span fabricated by the Missouri Valley Bridge & Iron Company. At roughly 100 feet long and only about 13 feet wide, it reflects the scale of the early automobile era when roads carried a fraction of today’s traffic.

The engineering challenge here wasn’t length — it was terrain. Chevelon Creek cuts a steep canyon through the Colorado Plateau, nearly 90 feet below the roadway. In the early 1900s, constructing a large masonry or concrete structure in this remote area would have been expensive and slow.…