Chevelon Creek Bridge

Engineering Stop of the Day: Chevelon Creek Bridge – near Winslow, Arizona

If you enjoy stumbling across forgotten infrastructure, the Chevelon Creek Bridge is a small but elegant example of early highway engineering in the American Southwest.

Built in 1912–1913, the bridge is a Warren pony-truss steel span fabricated by the Missouri Valley Bridge & Iron Company. At roughly 100 feet long and only about 13 feet wide, it reflects the scale of the early automobile era when roads carried a fraction of today’s traffic.

The engineering challenge here wasn’t length — it was terrain. Chevelon Creek cuts a steep canyon through the Colorado Plateau, nearly 90 feet below the roadway. In the early 1900s, constructing a large masonry or concrete structure in this remote area would have been expensive and slow. A prefabricated steel truss allowed engineers to ship components by rail and assemble them relatively quickly on site.

Originally the bridge carried the Santa Fe Highway, one of the early transcontinental auto routes linking New Mexico to California before the modern highway system existed. Within about a decade the main route shifted north toward what eventually became the U.S. 66 / Interstate 40 corridor, leaving this bridge on a quiet county road.

Ironically, that bypass likely saved it. Because heavy traffic disappeared early, the bridge survived mostly intact and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Today you can still drive across it on McLaws Road, experiencing the narrow deck, exposed steel truss members, and canyon drop exactly as early motorists did more than a century ago.

For engineering tourists, it’s a reminder that sometimes the most interesting structures aren’t the biggest ones — they’re the survivors from the first generation of infrastructure that opened the West to automobiles.