Bridge over troublesome waters....

I've been promisin' a post about the bridge for quite some time. I have to admit I've been procrastinatin' about it. I'm not sure why. I think it's because it's such a long story with no real way to make it short. The bridge has been an ongoing problem for years. Thought I had it purty well done at one point, then a massive flood came along and wiped her out. That one was all wood 4x6 beams, the supports doubled, everything lagged together and sittin' about 2 foot above the banks. Just to keep it above the spring floods. Right. If we would have had a "normal" flood that year, I think it would have been fine. But, we didn't. The water came up over 2 feet above the roof of the truck that was parked on the bank in front of the bridge. And guess what? Wood floats. And a big platform structure made of completely of wood floats really well. Kinda like a big raft. Whoda thunk it?
It's still there, just in a big tumbled heap about 40 yards downstream from where it's supposed to be and up over the bank.
So reboot, punt, and come up with a new plan.
My #5 son found some steel I-Beams. Big ones. Part of the problem was the span of 24 feet that is the width of the creek. The old original bridge was made of old locust logs, and was probably there 50 years. Once we moved over there and started using it on a daily basis, it started falling apart purty quickly. Hence the new wooden bridge fiasco. Anyway, back to the steel beams. 3 of them, 32 feet long. 20 inches wide at the web, 9 inches on the flange. 2600 pounds apiece! I won't go into here all the fun that was had during the delivery and trying to get them back to the creek. Maybe some other time. Once we had them to the creek, we had to figure out how to get them across. All we had was a footbridge that was put in with some of the remnants from the wrecked bridge. So we hooked a come-along to a tree and winched that beam across the footbridge while keeping our fingers and toes crossed that it wouldn't collapse before we had it across. We did end up shifting the bridge about 2 feet, but we got 'er done.

 Whew!
After that little bit of fun, it was just a matter of cleaning the beam (which I wasn't smart enough to do before I pulled it across) and flipping the other beams onto this one and running them across.

Ok, that's enough for now. Just going back thru all this is making me tired. More later...