The bridge across the Simpson River leading to Surprise Creek is an intriguing structure. It’s a bridge that has long linked Kootenay National Park to Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park in British Columbia.

I highlighted this bridge around 5 years ago when I published the blog post Reopening the Back Door to Mt Assiniboine. Richie Mann, age 92, stumbled across my blog on the internet recently. That triggered a memory of rebuilding the bridge back in 1952, when he was 19-years-old.

He posted a brief comment on my original blog remembering that work. That inspired me to write him in hopes that he could elaborate on the event and maybe send some photos, which he did.

Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park was much smaller than it is today (enlarged in 1973 from 5,120 hectares to 38,600 hectares). So, the Simpson River bridge lay on forest service land in 1952, which is why Richie was working for the BC Forest Service.

Following is his account of that long-ago autumn adventure.

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Richie Mann, 92 years old, remembering a long-ago autumn bridge-building on the Simpson River.

Three of us were taken in by Frank Johnson and his packhorses in the fall of 1952 after cutting trail up 5 mile cr. east of Nelson. BC. We were working for BC. Forest Service. I was crew boss and had Gavin Mcleod from Cranbrook and Lars ______(can’t remember his last Scandinavian name) from Clearwater with me. I would have been 19 at the time.

When we went in to build the bridge across the Simpson it had snowed as we were going in so we had wet snow conditions to work with. We fell 2 trees across the river for our stringers. After building our log peers we filled them with rocks out of the river. (One cold job as I remember.) Then got the stringers onto the peers. We then split jackpine logs to make a flat deck and made our pole trusses. I can’t remember how we attached the large turnbuckles to finish the trusses and I can’t make them out in the photo. We only had axes and Swede saws back then. No chainsaws yet. 

It was only a one day trip, I think, from the Kootenay River to the old cabin you see in the picture. So I think it must have been at Surprise Cr.. The Cabin I see now in your pictures says it was built in the 1960s and I am wondering if the one we stayed in had been removed to build the new one. I also wonder how long our truss bridge lasted.