Hagwilget Canyon Bridge

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Hagwilget Canyon Bridge
Hagwilget Canyon Bridge.jpg
Coordinates 55°15′27″N127°36′14″W / 55.2575°N 127.604°W / 55.2575; -127.604 Coordinates: 55°15′27″N127°36′14″W / 55.2575°N 127.604°W / 55.2575; -127.604
Carries Vehicular traffic, pedestrians
Crosses Bulkley River (Hagwilget Canyon)
Locale Hagwilget, BC
Characteristics
Design Suspension Bridge
Total length 140.2 metres (460 ft)
Width 4.9 metres (16 ft)
Height 80 metres (262 ft)
History
Construction end 1931 (reinforced in 1990)

Hagwilget Canyon Bridge is a suspension bridge over the Hagwilget Canyon on the Bulkley River, at the Wet'suwet'en village of Hagwilget, British Columbia. The current bridge was constructed in 1931, and later reinforced in 1990.

Suspension bridge type of bridge

A suspension bridge is a type of bridge in which the deck is hung below suspension cables on vertical suspenders. The first modern examples of this type of bridge were built in the early 1800s. Simple suspension bridges, which lack vertical suspenders, have a long history in many mountainous parts of the world.

Hagwilget Canyon is a canyon on the Bulkley River of northwestern British Columbia, Canada, located several kilometres upstream from that river's confluence with the Skeena River at Hazelton, at the Wet'suwet'en village of Hagwilget.

Bulkley River river in Canada

The Bulkley River in British Columbia is a major tributary of the Skeena River. The Bulkley is 257 kilometres (160 mi) long with a drainage basin covering 12,400 square kilometres (4,800 sq mi).

Three previous bridges spanned the same location, the first constructed by Wet'suwet'en people, generations before white settlement. The Wet'suwet'en later reinforced their bridge using cable abandoned after the disbandment of the Russian–American Telegraph expedition. [1]

Russian–American Telegraph

The Russian–American Telegraph, also known as the Western Union Telegraph Expedition and the Collins Overland Telegraph, was a $3,000,000 undertaking by the Western Union Telegraph Company in 1865–1867, to lay an electric telegraph line from San Francisco, California to Moscow, Russia.

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References

  1. Michael Kluckner. "Vanishing B.C. Hagwilget Bridge" . Retrieved 8 March 2011.

Coordinates: 55°15′27″N127°36′16″W / 55.2575°N 127.6044°W / 55.2575; -127.6044

Geographic coordinate system Coordinate system

A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position and two or three of the numbers represent a horizontal position; alternatively, a geographic position may be expressed in a combined three-dimensional Cartesian vector. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation. To specify a location on a plane requires a map projection.