Fishing Bridge is a small development on the East Entrance Road, 0.67 mile off the Grand Loop, with a visitor center, store and gas. Anyone continuing the tour goes straight at the junction for Canyon, so the bridge itself means a short out-and-back on the spur. Built in 1937, the bridge has been closed to fishing since 1973 and has become a place for watching the water rather than working it. A 2019 project gave it a new deck over its old wooden piers. The area's history is a long argument between grizzlies and people: a 1974 plan called for removing the whole development, and part of it stayed. Vault toilets sit just before the junction, on the right for northbound drivers.
Fishing Bridge Junction is half a mile on. Right takes you about two-thirds of a mile down the East Entrance Road to the bridge, the visitor center, the store and gas. Straight goes to Canyon, and that's the tour. If you go see the bridge, come back to this junction and turn right. There are vault toilets on your right just before it. Nobody fishes from Fishing Bridge. It's been closed to fishing since nineteen seventy-three. The bridge dates from nineteen thirty-seven and it still stands on wooden piers, protected from ice damage by work in twenty nineteen. The park says some associated Tribes used this area as a rendezvous site. The park's nineteen seventy-four Master Plan called for removing this entire development to restore wildlife habitat, and the reason had four legs. Of forty-eight grizzlies killed from nineteen forty-three to nineteen fifty-nine, accidents and control kills together, twenty-four came from Fishing Bridge and Pelican Creek. By nineteen seventy-seven the campground was limited to hard-sided vehicles. In nineteen eighty-four came a firestorm of letters and meetings with Wyoming's United States senators. By nineteen ninety-one the park's campground and the cabins were gone, and the removal went essentially no further. An RV campground stayed. Grizzlies one, senators one, and you're driving through the tie.
Photo: Historic American Engineering Record (set photographer Jet Lowe), July 1983, HAER WYO,15-YELNAP,3--10, Library of Congress · Public domain (U.S. government work; LoC: no known restrictions on images made by the U.S. Government)