http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=5638
HistoryLink.org
The Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History
Washington rebuilds an historic steel cantilever bridge as the Lyons Ferry Bridge across the Snake River in 1968.
In 1968, Washington Department of Highways rebuilds an old steel cantilever bridge as the Lyons Ferry Bridge across the Snake River. The rebuilt bridge spans the Snake near its confluence with the Palouse River on State Route 261, in the vicinity of Starbuck. The historic structure, originally built in 1927 to cross the Columbia River at Vantage, was dismantled and put into storage in 1963.
The narrow two-lane bridge had served since 1927 as the crossing of the Sunset Highway over Columbia River at Vantage. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Army Corps of Engineers built the Wanapum Dam downriver from the Vantage Ferry Bridge, as it was then called. This caused the rising Columbia River to flood the town of Vantage and its bridge. Rather than rebuild the bridge in that location, the Washington Department of Highways decided to replace it with a four-lane bridge better able to carry the increased traffic on what would become Interstate-90. The old bridge was dismantled and put into storage.
A New Old Bridge
Lyons Ferry, at first known as Palouse Ferry because it is at the confluence of the Palouse and Snake rivers, became an important ferry crossing in 1862 when the Mullan Road was opened. For many decades a private toll ferry powered only by the current carried traffic across the river. When the Army Corps of Engineers built the Lower Monumental Dam (1969) downstream from Lyons Ferry, the waters rising behind the dam slowed currents in the Snake River, increasing crossing-times.
Under these circumstances, the Washington Department of Highways decided to re-erect the stored bridge at the new location. The narrow two-lane bridge was suitable for the secondary road (State Route 261) that would cross the river.
Pier, Deck, and Truss
The bridge appears much the same as it did at Vantage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equisetum
Equisetum
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Equisetum (horsetail, snake grass, puzzlegrass) is the only living genus in the Equisetaceae, a family of vascular plants that reproduce by spores rather than seeds.
Equisetum is a "living fossil", as it is the only living genus of the entire class Equisetopsida, which for over one hundred million years was much more diverse and dominated the understory of late Paleozoic forests. Some Equisetopsida were large trees reaching to 30 meters tall; the genus Calamites of family Calamitaceae for example is abundant in coal deposits from the Carboniferous period.
It has been suggested that the pattern of spacing of nodes in horsetails, wherein those toward the apex of the shoot are increasingly close together, inspired John Napier to discover logarithms.
- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 02:49 AM Pacific Time USA Tuesday 29 May 2012
