The Bridge To Nowhere – Hope, Idaho, 1965-1975 

 From an Email from Larry Adams, Winter 2010 

Road building sometimes requires extra care and special design considerations to avoid 

sensitive properties and treacherous terrain. Larry Adams wrote about his experiences on 

U.S. Highway Alternate 10, now Idaho 200. While bypassing a steep hillside and 

dangerous curves, the design also incorporated a bridge over railroad right-of-way that 

had to arc out over a lake in order to avoid impacts on a school and a cemetery. 

Some stretches of road are destined for notoriety, even before they are completed. 

Although Idaho 200 now carries thousands of vehicles a day across the northern part of the 

state’s panhandle, a portion of the project near Hope, Idaho, caught the attention of the 

media during its construction. 

Two bridges were to be constructed over the railroad, Larry Adams recalled, and 

“the first contract was let to Max Kuney of Spokane, Washington,” for the bridges and some 

minor grading work. It was a two-year project, with “the first bridge near Hope, Idaho, and 

the second one at Denton, 8 miles toward Montana over the same railroad. Paul Luckeroth

was the Project Engineer.” 

Dave Patterson and C. Garland Pendergraph each worked for a year on the 

project as part of their Highway Engineer Training program, and “Joe Haynes, Jerry 

Bruyer, and myself were the Surveyors/Inspectors, but not in the same year. This was the 

first bridge Jerry Bruyer was on and he went on to be Project Engineer on a lot more, 

including the Ronald Reagan Bridge in California.” 

The contractor was supposed “to provide the railroad with a one million dollar 

liability policy” before the work could even begin. “However, the railroad made them 

provide each bridge with the same policy,” Larry remembered. This was required, “so the 

story goes...because an operator on a Spokane Kuney project had hooked the rail with his 

scraper at a crossing.” That incident occurred just before the arrival of the fast freight from 

Seattle to Chicago, he said, “and it derailed.” 

Once the project was underway, “the first order of work was to push fill material 

into the lake so piling could be driven for the abutment 2. The material came from lowering 

the roadway on the right down to design grade for about a mile west of Hope.” Additional 

fill was also collected during the “drilling and blasting...being done at Denton” along the 

new alignment. To maintain a safe work environment for both the construction crews and 

the railroad’s operations, “there were railroad flagmen at both sites with radio contact with 

the train engineers...They would stop traffic crossing over the tracks when a train was due. 

This was called a “Y” order to the railroad making the trains slow down through the sites.” 

There were few construction problems at the Denton site: “most of the piers and 

abutment 2 were founded on bedrock, and at abutment 1 piling were driven.” However, the 

Hope site had enough problems to keep things interesting for quite some time. 

Larry explained that the “excavated material was placed and dozed out into the lake 

to make a platform to drive piling for abutment 2. While this was being done, Garland, 

Dave, and I were in the process of establishing its centerline point. From the PI (point of 

intersection) we set the PS (point of spiral); it came before the abutment. I set the point and 

told Garland to come ahead with the transit, and when he got there, he said ‘where’s the 

hub?'” Larry said he tried to show him the hub, but it was not there. “The entire 

embankment had slipped out into the lake.” 
By this point in the operation, the fill material had nearly all been used, and a 

decision had to be made about how to proceed: “should we get a borrow site and keep 

filling, or what?” Larry recalled that “John Mors, Division Engineer, and others came out 

to see what was happening. They took soundings with the project boat and found where the 

material had stopped, about 100 yards from shore. 

“Putting in more fill was not the answer, so a change order was written to change 

the abutment to a pier, requiring a cofferdam to set the pier on bedrock. This allowed this 

project to be completed in 1967,” Larry said, but “then it was back to the drawing board” to 

re-design the next segment, beyond the new bridge. 

It is easy to see why the local media started calling the structure the Bridge To 

Nowhere. “Looking east down the centerline of the bridge,” Larry said, it 

appeared “as though the road was headed toward Warren Island,” and the end of 

the bridge seemed to align perfectly with a small airstrip that had been cleared 

through the trees. “The Island was supposedly owned by Lucille Ball and 

Desi Arnaz.” 

Photo courtesy Larry Adams. 

It would be another two years before construction activity resumed. “To get back to 

dry land, an extension had to be designed and attached to the existing bridge. It was 

determined that towers every 100 feet for a length of 900 feet was necessary. This contract 

was let to Willamette Western Corporation of Portland, Oregon, in 1969.” Larry added that 

“it was completed in 1970. 

“The curvature of the extension was spiral, curve, spiral, and then tangent. It was a 

head scratcher to establish reference points for each tower.” Ray Schadt, a graduate of the 

HET program, was the Project Engineer, and Larry said that Ray, “Ron Agenbroad, HET, 

Ed Berg, and myself established three parallel base lines along the shore line and 

calculated the distances to establish reference points. The four 18-inch diameter piling per 

tower were to be drilled and seated six feet into bedrock. The towers were 32 feet square. 

The contractor constructed a template to set on temporary piling that could be adjusted for 

correct alignment. 

“The 18-inch permanent piling were set in the template and driven with an air 

hammer to what appeared to be bedrock (and) cleaned out with a sand pump. Then drilling 

began. The drill was the same as the drills used for water wells, only a somewhat larger bit. 

To be sure they were in bedrock, we washed a sample of material over a number 4 sieve. If 

it was p-gravel,” he recalled, they kept drilling, but if it was fractured rock, they would drill 

only six more feet. 

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There was more than the usual excitement when the core samples were brought up 

at tower 5. Larry said “the washed bedrock appeared to have pieces of silver ore.” He 

added his wish for “good luck” to anyone who wants to work that mine. “They'd have to 

tunnel under the tower.” 

“After the pile was seated, an 8-inch wide flange with guides was welded to center 

it in the pile, seated, then seal concrete was pumped in to fill it up. A slope indicator tube 

was welded on the northeast tower leg to determine if it moved by the slippage of the 

material above bedrock.” He added that “Daryl Ramey was transferred to the project 

around this time.” 

Larry explained how the towers were erected: “Bracing at tower 1 was set 

starting with (the) bottom section. First, all the bracing was set and bolted; it was then 

lowered down and clamped, then the center section was set and bolted. The clamps were 

loosened and (it was) lowered to its final position. Then the top section was set. This 

allowed the erection to be done above water. Not all towers have 3 sections, but the 

bottom sections were done first. 

“There are clamps at each corner with 1-inch high-strength bolts holding them 

together.” Because the bolts were under water, they needed a licensed diver to check 

them. “Guess what? One of our Project Engineers was one, so John Pugh got a paid 

summer vacation on beautiful Pend Oreille Lake to check underwater bolting.” 

A few unexpected setbacks delayed work on the contract. Larry recalled that the 

barge the crane was on sunk twice during winter storms. In a couple of other incidents, 

the boom collapsed while picking up material. 

“There were several 

projects completed on this 

route, starting at site two back 

to site one,” Larry said. 

“These projects were assigned 

to Gordon Mead or Eugene 

Hendrickson.” He added that 

“Henry Gini, Daryl Ramey, 

and a lot of others were there. 

“By the time the final 

project was let, the 

embankment was completed to 

the abutment at the end of the 

extension,” and traffic was 

flowing again “on the section 

from site two to a railroad 

crossing at East Hope.” 

Slutten Construction 

Company of Great Falls, 

Montana, was selected “to 

furnish and set the prestressed 

In this picture of the extension, Larry said, you can also see 

beyond it “the cranes on a barge picking up a prestressed 

beam on the bridge to transfer it to its location....The 

construction end dump was working on a different contract, 

constructing a boat launch and boat moorage.” Note the 

bright spot on the bank at the beginning of the extension. This, 

he noted, “is a wall holding the Chinese Cemetery from sliding 

off the hill.” The people buried there had been brought in to 

work on the railroad. “There was thought of moving the 

cemetery,” he said, until they considered the virtually 

impossible task of trying to notify next of kin in China for 

people who had been “buried there in the early 1900’s.” 

Photo courtesy Larry Adams. 

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concrete girders, form the deck, and pour it. They also had to remove the curbs on the first 

bridge for additional width, and form and pour a parapet wall on both sides.” He added that 

“this was also a two-part bridge deck. After the deck was finished on the extension, a 1-

inch Dow latex modified concrete was placed on both bridges to seal the deck” and protect 

the reinforcing steel from the corrosion that’s caused by deicer. 

Once the final contract had been completed, it was time to reopen the route. 

Providing a sweeping view across the lake, the bridge was opened and as Larry noted, the 

traffic started “across the Bridge to Nowhere, because now it went somewhere.” 

The prestressed beams were set into place “on a 1- or 2-inch 

rubber pad. The man is one of the contractor employees,” 

Larry added, “probably an ironworker. I'm not so sure that it 

isn’t Bill Ayotte’s brother-in-law, Clinton Meyer.” Photo 

courtesy Larry Adams. 

For Ray Westby’s memories about the design side of this project, see the story on A Few of 

BPR’s Construction “Firsts.” During his interview in the Spring of 2008, Ray also 

mentioned a project he was on near Concrete, Washington, that he described as another 

kind of “a ‘bridge to nowhere.’ I can’t remember what year it was,” he said, but “we built 

a bridge up at the end of one of these roads that crossed Bear Lake. It got inundated before 

they ever used it....They raised the pool up under it on the reservoir.” It was one of those 

projects, he said, that “we don’t talk about much – it was money 

poorly spent.” 

Retirees who would like to contribute stories about their experiences for this series 

are invited to email them to me at marili.reilly@dot.gov. 

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