Royal Gorge Bridge

The bridge was never meant to carry a road anywhere. Lon Piper, a promoter from San Antonio, put it up across the rim of the Royal Gorge between June and November 1929 for about $350,000, purely so visitors could pay to walk across it and look down at the Arkansas River and the railroad far below. It is a suspension bridge about 1,260 feet long, its deck laid with 1,292 wooden planks you can see the river between.

A park grew up around it: a miniature railroad in the 1950s, an incline railway down to the river, an aerial tram across the gorge in 1969. On the afternoon of June 11, 2013, a wildfire started on the south side of the gorge and ran through the park in a matter of hours. It burned more than 3,200 acres and 48 of the park's 52 buildings, including the visitor center and the tram, and charred 32 of the bridge's planks; about a hundred were replaced.

The steel did not fail. Rebuilding began in January 2014 and the park reopened at the end of that August, with a new visitor center whose front carries some of the damaged planks, and later new gondolas and a zip line across the gorge east of the bridge. The trains of the Royal Gorge Route still run along the river at the bottom, on the line two railroads once fought over.