Bixby Creek Bridge

Bixby Creek Bridge carries California's Highway 1 across a deep coastal canyon on the Big Sur coast, and it is the rare road bridge that improves the landscape it crosses. A single reinforced-concrete arch, 360 feet across, springs from the canyon walls and holds the deck some 280 feet above the creek; slender open spandrel columns rise from the arch to the roadway, so the structure reads as a pale, almost weightless curve between dark cliffs, with the creek running out to the Pacific below. Set against the cliffs and the ocean, it looks less like infrastructure than part of the coast.

Before the bridge, travellers on this stretch of coast had to follow the Old Coast Road, which detoured about eleven miles inland to get around the canyon. The state highway engineer was C. H. Purcell and the bridge was designed by F. W. Panhorst; the San Francisco firm Ward Engineering won the contract in August 1931. Construction began that same month and the bridge was finished in October 1932, slightly under budget, and opened in November. At completion it was described as the highest single-span arch bridge in the world.

The creek takes its name from Charles Henry Bixby, a businessman who came to California in 1852; for a time the structure was also called the Rainbow Bridge, after a resort upstream. The arch ribs thicken from about five feet at the deck to nine at their base, a detail visible if you look closely at how the curve gathers weight towards the rock. Nearly a century on, the bridge still carries the highway, and it has become one of the best-known images of the Big Sur coast.

Getting there

The bridge is on Highway 1 about 13 miles south of Carmel-by-the-Sea and roughly 25 km from Monterey; Monterey Regional Airport (MRY) is about 25 km away, and San Francisco lies some 120 miles to the north. The bridge is on the highway itself, so it is reached by road.