September 28, 29, & 30, 2001 - 10 Scouts (including all 9 Scouts that attended the Continental Divide trip), along with Mr. Jewell, Mr. Hegar, & Mr. Hoffman traveled to Lake Texoma to rebuild a fallen footbridge on the Cross Timbers hiking trail.

We discovered the need for a new bridge during one of our shakedown campouts in preparation of our Continental Divide trip.  In order to complete our 50 Miler, we needed a 10 hour service project to improve a trail, campsite, etc., and decided to rebuild the bridge.  A couple of weekends before this campout, Mr. Jewell and Mr. Hoffman drove up to the bridge site to measure the bridge length and get some idea of materials that would be needed to re-construct a better bridge.  We decided on a 56 foot long, 2 foot wide bridge with one hand rail.

We drove to Juniper Point campground Friday evening, and set up camp in the dark, followed by some late evening snacks.  Everyone went to bed around 10pm.

We got up at 6:15am, and had breakfast, then loaded up all of the tools onto the flatbed trailer we brought to haul the lumber and electric generator.  We arrived at the bridge site a little after 7am.

We began the task by splitting the crew into two teams.  One team began taking apart the old "bridge" that had been built some time before.  The builder simply nailed some landscape timbers down as a one foot wide foot-bed on top of some 4 x 4 posts that were set on the ground.  Over the years, the bridge had fallen over because it was not properly anchored into the soft ground.  The other team unloaded the flatbed trailer, moving all of the lumber and concrete down to the work site.  We disassembled the old bridge, and scavenged as many of the old landscape timbers as possible for our new bridge.  

As soon as the old bridge materials had been removed and sorted, we began laying out the lines of the new bridge.  We used mason's lines to run parallel lines 2 feet apart for the entire distance of the new bridge to represent the new two foot wide foot-bed.  We had to clear some brush and cut some low branches, but Mr. Hegar's chainsaw made short work of the task.

As soon as the track was cleared, we began digging post holes and anchoring our bridge risers in concrete.  We used the best landscape timbers from the old bridge as our risers.  We placed the risers all of the way down the track at 8 foot intervals.  

After we had placed about half of the risers, we split into two groups again.  One group continued anchoring the risers while the other group began the task of building foot-bed joist supports across each pair of risers.  We used 2 x 8's for our cross members and bolted them to the risers.

We began bolting up our foot-bed joists after the cross members had been assembled.  We used 16 foot long 2 x 12's as foot-bed joists with a cross member supporting the joist every 8 feet.

We then began to lay the foot-bed by nailing 2 foot long pieces of 2 x 8's across the foot-bed joists.

While the boys were nailing down the foot-bed, the adults used a circular saw to cut the risers to desired height.  On the low side of the bridge we cut them off flush with the foot-bed.  On the high side of the bridge, we cut them off 3 feet above the foot-bed to act as risers for a hand rail along the length of the new bridge.  We used 2 x 4's nailed to the tops of the risers as our hand rail.

The final task was to build steps or ramps up onto the foot-bed from the trail at each end.  Because of the different "step up heights" on each end, we decided on a step for one end and a ramp for the other end.

We cleaned up or mess, re-loaded the trailer, and took a group shot on the bridge. The group spent almost 11 hours (not including lunch) building the new foot bridge.  The weather was perfect for the project.  The only drawback to the project was the mud.  The bridge was built over a boggy area that has a couple of small run-off streams running through it.  Everything we wore, and all of our tools wore caked in mud by the end of the day.

We went back to Juniper Point for showers, then went to feast at Catfish Haven, a family restaurant we discovered in May on our shakedown campout.

The crew worked as a team today.  They were given a task, directions for the task, and followed through to the end.