Hayden Arch Bridge West Of Cody Is 100 Years Old And One Of A Kind

On June 21, 1925, a bottle of thermal water from the DeMaris Hot Springs was used to christen the Hayden Arch Bridge in the Shoshone Canyon west of Cody.

Vehicles were soon streaming across it on their way to Yellowstone National Park.

Now 100 years later, Cody residents intend to replicate the same ceremony at the bridge which still spans over the Shoshone River despite losing its status as the bridge to Yellowstone.

The Hayden Arch Bridge was a critical infrastructure project in Cody’s early history and remains the only medium-span arch bridge ever built in Wyoming for vehicle use.

A century after its construction, a coalition of Cody residents is leveraging its past to ensure its future.

“People need to know,” said Robyn Cutter with the Park County Archives, who is co-authoring a book on the Hayden Arch Bridge. “A lot of people I've talked to said they didn’t know anything about that bridge.

“That’s why stressing the importance and the preservation of this bridge in this day and age is very important.”

A Better Bridge

The Hayden Arch Bridge was built by the Crocker Construction Co. from 1924-1925. It’s a concrete open-spandrel primary arch bridge supported by eight secondary arches, spanning 115 feet across the Shoshone River in Shoshone Canyon.

Cutter said the bridge was designed for an essential purpose: to ensure tourists’ safe arrival at the East Entrance of Yellowstone.

“The original road from Cody to Yellowstone was terrible,” she said. “It had sharp curves, ups and downs, and everything else. It was not a safe road.”

Buffalo Bill Cody was the first to build a bridge across the Shoshone River, opening a simple crossing bridge in 1904. That bridge was refurbished in 1912 and was considered perfectly adequate — until it wasn’t.  

In 1912, three people in an automobile backed off the original bridge and fell into the river below. Nobody died, but one person was seriously hurt.

The age of the automobile had arrived, which necessitated a better bridge in Shoshone Canyon.

The Wyoming Highway Department got to work with a grand design for a new bridge that could handle the increasing number of vehicles streaming toward Yellowstone.

“The automobiles were coming,” Cutter said. “The city of Cody and the Wyoming Highway Department started looking at the North Fork Road and realized they needed a new, safer bridge.”

The Pioneer Engineer

The bridge was named for a famous Wyoming pioneer, but not the one most people recognize. Rather than Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, the geologist and Yellowstone explorer, it was named for “the pioneer engineer” Charles Hayden.

Charles Hayden was one of Cody's founding visionaries and its first engineer. He started working for the Shoshone Land and Irrigation Company, building the Cody Canal and laying out the plan for the town of Cody.

When he joined the Burlington Railroad in 1901, Hayden connected Cody to Sheridan, Gillette, and the Crow Agency in southern Montana.

His work brought agriculture and tourism to the burgeoning communities of northwest Wyoming, and he didn’t stop there.

“He became the first Justice of the Peace in Cody, and performed the town’s first marriage ceremony,” Cutter said.

In 1909, Hayden began the first of four terms in the Wyoming Legislature, eventually becoming Speaker of the House.

His most significant act was the bill that created Park County, which had been part of neighboring Big Horn County.

“That was a struggle, because Big Horn County didn’t want to separate,” Cutter said. “Hayden presented the bill to create Park County along with William Simpson, the grandfather of Al and Pete Simpson.”

Hayden owned and operated several businesses before becoming a resident engineer with the Wyoming Highway Department. He recognized the need for a new bridge over the Shoshone River and was the best man to get it done.

A Beautiful Bridge

Cutter said Hayden knew the bridge had to be structurally stable. But that didn’t stop him from making an aesthetic statement with his design.

“Hayden and the Wyoming Highway Department were very conscientious about building a beautiful bridge,” she said. “The North Fork Road was the most scenic drive to Yellowstone, so they said, ‘We can't just build an ordinary, average bridge.’ It had to be a beautiful bridge.”

Hayden’s design was ambitious: an arch bridge, a style deemed unsuitable for most Wyoming locations because of the large side loads produced by its design. The bridge remains the only one of any size ever built in the Cowboy State.

The ambitious arch bridge cost around $30,000 to build, which would be $550,000 today. According to an article in The Cody Enterprise published in January 1924, the project was “the first to be undertaken by the state highway department.”

When the bridge opened in 1925, it was deemed “the most beautiful bridge in Wyoming” and remains one of the state’s most architecturally significant vehicular bridges.

“They said this bridge will be built in 100 days, and it was,” Cutter said. “They had 18 men on site per day for 100 days building that bridge, and that just amazes me. It’s a remarkable construction achievement.”

Cutter believes it was extremely appropriate to name the bridge after its designer.

“Hayden was very significant in the history of Cody and this project,” she said. “It’s not just that he built this bridge, but for what he did for this community.”

‘Rerouted’

For decades, the Hayden Arch Bridge served its intended purpose, carrying tourists over the Shoshone River to “the Black and Yellow Highway” between Cody and Yellowstone.

While the bridge was better, there was still a desire for a better route through Shoshone Canyon.

In the 1960s, tunnels were blasted through the granite on the northern edge of the canyon near the Buffalo Bill Dam, part of a project to reroute Highway 14-16-20 that built a new bridge and a better road that didn’t precipitously wind along the base of the canyon.

The new road meant the Hayden Arch Bridge would no longer carry the steady stream of Yellowstone tourist traffic. However, the bridge remained a critical piece of infrastructure for Cody.

The Shoshone Power Plant opened as Wyoming’s first hydropower plant in 1922. The Hayden Arch Bridge provided critical access to the Buffalo Bill Dam, the power plant, and other infrastructure in the canyon.

“It’s still an important structure,” said Lyle Myler, the Wyoming Area Manager with the Bureau of Reclamation (BLR). “The BLR assumed responsibility for the bridge when the highway was rerouted, and we still use it and the road to access our facilities.”

Today, locals enjoy using the “Old Yellowstone Road” as a walking and cycling path, and rock climbers frequent the canyon's sheer walls that can be accessed along it. Many people use a small parking lot on the southern side of the Hayden Arch Bridge to reach the road.

The Hayden Arch Bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, 60 years after its opening.

A lot has changed in the century since the opening, and while the bridge is still standing, many people are contemplating its role in the century to come.

The Options

There must be a bridge across the Shoshone River, but the Hayden Arch Bridge is showing its age. Myler said the BLR regularly evaluated the bridge’s structural integrity, and despite its unique design, it’s been showing its age.

“What we're seeing is that the bridge's carrying capacity is diminishing over time,” he said. “In 2024, the bridge had a load-carrying capacity of about 23 tons. After additional evaluations on the bridge performed recently, we're further lowering that load carrying capacity to about 17 tons.”

That diminished carrying capacity might not mean much to pedestrians and cyclists, but it’s a pressing concern for the BLR. The BLR still needs to use the bridge to carry heavy loads of equipment and supplies to the various facilities in Shoshone Canyon.

“We have four hydroelectric plants and an office that the bridge provides access to,” Myler said. “We're looking at building alternate means of access so that we can continue to maintain our other critical infrastructure associated with power plants and the Buffalo Bill Dam.”

Myler said those “alternate means” include refurbishing the Hayden Arch Bridge, building a new road off the North Fork Canyon, and constructing a new bridge downstream of the historic bridge.

“The new bridge was the preferred alternative,” Myler said. “The original conceptual estimate was around $9 million, but additional geotechnical investigations have increased the cost to around $17 million.”

The BLR has secured a $4 million grant for the project and is pursuing a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bridge Investment Program.

Rehabilitating the Hayden Arch Bridge to restore its lost carrying capacity would be counterintuitively difficult and expensive. Myler said it’s still in “good condition,” especially for its age, but its inevitable deterioration can’t be overlooked.

“While it's a significant historic structure, it has, over the years, shown its wear and tear,” he said. “There is some delamination of the concrete and deterioration in the steel.

“That’s why we’re looking at a whole host of options, including the replacement of the existing bridge with a new one downstream.”

Blast From The Past

Cutter and Cody historian Bob Richard were working on a book about the history of the Hayden Arch Bridge when they discovered the details of its opening on June 21, 1925.

They decided the best way to honor its history was a modern-day recreation of the original christening.

“We’re having the ceremony on the same date at the same time as the original ceremony – 4 p.m. on June 21,” Cutter said. “Jane Garlow, Buffalo Bill’s granddaughter, was the one who christened it in 1925. Lindsay Garlow and Kelly Edwards, descendants of Buffalo Bill, will rechristen the bridge.”

Speakers at the 1925 christening included Cody Mayor R.C. Trueblood, Yellowstone Superintendent Horace Albright, and Twila Berringer, who sang the state song “Wyoming.” The 2025 rechristening will include Cody Mayor Lee Ann Reiter with “Wyoming” sung by Kennedy Corr.

The tricky part was getting a bottle of thermal water from DeMaris Hot Springs. In the century since the bridge’s opening, the once-public hot spring downstream of the bridge transferred to private ownership.

“I was able to coordinate getting some actual DeMaris spring water in a jug,” Cutter said. “The bridge will be rechristened with the same water used in 1925.”

Cutter believes the Hayden Arch Bridge will transition into a footbridge where people can enjoy Shoshone Canyon and the history of the Old Yellowstone Road.

She’s happy that the BLR is considering the bridge’s history in its long-term plans, and hopes they secure enough funding to “patch up” the old bridge while building the new one.

Nevertheless, preserving history is an active exercise.

Cutter hopes the rechristening on June 21 will increase people’s awareness of the importance of the one-of-a-kind bridge. that helped carry Cody into the future and helped it become the bastion of Western tourism it is today.

“We need to remind people why the Hayden Arch Bridge is significant,” she said. “The Shoshone Canyon has evolved and changed, but the bridge is still there. It’s not an ordinary bridge.

“Hayden and Cody were very conscientious about building a beautiful bridge along the most scenic route to Yellowstone, and we want people to know what its future holds.”

Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.