Elegant isn’t a word often associated with Flaming Gorge, the cavernous path of the Green River in Utah and Wyoming so named by explorer John Wesley Powell in 1869 "because the brilliant red gorge, from a distance, looked as if it were on fire."
But elegant is a good description for the 550-foot-long steel arch with a 28-foot-wide roadway hanging from narrow cables.
That easy grace belies the fact that during construction, workers discovered the canyon’s walls to be fractured and unstable. Holes were drilled into the cliffs and steel bars were concealed within the rocks to anchor each end. But that’s the secret of good engineering: You don’t see the strain.
