An abandoned 1934 steel deck truss stands south of today's highway, barricaded and closed to all traffic, a survivor of the first road between Cameron and the canyon. Its sandstone wing walls were built to match Desert View. It is a sight from the car only, on Navajo land.
Eyes right, south of the road, if you can catch it. About a hundred fifty yards off the highway stands a steel bridge from nineteen thirty-four, barricaded, carrying nothing. It carried the first road, before the highway you're on. It's closed, so it's a look from the car and no walking out. The Gray Mountains rise above it, seven thousand one hundred feet, and the Little Colorado gorge runs less than a mile north of this highway. It was rated Arizona's last and longest deck truss. The painters kept quitting. Most were house painters out of work, and they'd never worked that high. Laborers on the job made four dollars a day and stone masons made ten. Out here, a landscape architect insisted on sandstone for the wing walls and abutments in place of bare concrete, so the stonework would match Desert View. The masons quarried boulders from the canyon's own stream bed, and the specifications allowed no more than ten percent of the stones to be the same size. Think of a man who'd spent his working life on porches, out on that steel with a bucket of paint, looking down.
Photo: Brian C. Grogan, Photographer, 1994, Historic American Engineering Record, HAER AZ-46, Library of Congress · Public domain (U.S. government work; LoC: no known restrictions on images made by the U.S. Government)