M28 Bridge over the AuTrain River

We are in the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan for this Sunday's Bridge for M. Louis LaVache and other bridge friends.  The AuTrain River's journey to Lake Superior is almost finished.  Here M28, the road between Sault St. Marie and Wakefield, crosses the river as it begins to flow through the glorious white sand beach of AuTrain Bay. 

For bridges from all over the world, please visit Louis and friends at Sunday Bridges.

Monarch of the bridge

Gene is ruler of the suspension bridge over the Presque Isle River which forms the western boundary of the beautiful Porcupines Wilderness State Park.  In our twenty four years of traveling the UP every summer, we have done the trail along the western side of the river several times, in awe always of the waterfalls and amazing rock formations formed by the water.  The bridge is near the mouth of the river and takes you to a piece of land that is an island when the water is high, i.e.,  every spring. 

Join Louis' gang of bridges watchers at the series Sunday Bridges.

Viewed from the top of the bridge

You are looking at part of the structure of the Shelldrake Dam and the foot bridge that crosses over it in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.   This dam and bridge were a part of a rustic (i.e., no modern plumbing) Michigan State Forest Campground until closed two years ago because of budget problems.

It was located just to the northwest of Paradise (see my Mighty Mac bridge photo on April 18) and southeast of Whitefish Point, off which the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior in November, 1975.  The "Fitz" was carrying taconite, low grade iron ore, from Superior, Wisconsin, for the steel mills of Detroit and Toledo when she sank just north of Whitefish Bay in the "gales of November;"  this tragedy of all lives lost was immortalized by Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot.  For more of this story of the inland seas, go to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.

For more bridges from around the world, visit Louis la Vache's Sunday Bridge Series

Crumbling on Cowling Rd

This bridge has captured the imagination of many, in photos and in paintings.  The surface is dirt and grass and now leads only to what look like deer trails in the woods to the right.  It bridges the Rocky River, one of the three rivers that gave Three Rivers its name.  The other two are the Portage and the St. Joseph which is winding its way to Lake Michigan via South Bend (of the St. Joseph, that is), Indiana.  It is the St. Joseph that brought the French Jesuits to the future Three Rivers in 1760. 

A watercolor of the bridge was in a recent annual juried exhibit at the Three Rivers Carnegie Center for the Arts.  Ken Clay captured it beautifully and included with his original watercolor was a reproduction of a painting of an English bridge, almost a replica of the Cowling bridge.  That English painting was brought to this country when his grandparents immigrated to the US to remind them of the home they had left but still loved.

the Mighty Mac

Leaving the Upper Peninsula, riding over the Mighty Mac (Mackinac Bridge which connects the two "peninsulas" of Michigan), I always cry.....  This is from September, 2006, the end of a trip to Paradise, a village and a state of mind in the UP.   This is for M. Louis la Vache's  Sunday Bridge Series.
For more on this beautiful bridge over the Straits of Mackinac (pronounced as if the last letter is a "w"), go to the bridge authority website: http://www.mackinacbridge.org/.
For a novel about one of the young men from the UP who worked on the bridge when it was being built, try Jim Harrison's Sun Dog.