Backwoods Blog

ROPE BRIDGE

Backwoods Blog;

in the woods and on the road…

Rope Bridge in the backwoods   (1997)

For those of you who follow The Backwoods Blog, you may recognize the above photo as the home page image on the blog site backwoodsblog.com The rope bridge is one of the defining features of our place in the woods and walking across it one of the first things visitors want to try. The rope bridge was built in the summer of 1997, but like all things, time eventually takes its toll and at some point the end comes. After twenty seven years and thousands of crossings and countless moments just standing on the bridge with a cup of coffee in hand watching the river run by, it was time to dismantle the iconic rope bridge. 

The idea for the rope bridge was not even mine. Steve Mairs, a friend from Portland, thought there should be an easier way to get from the cabin to the sauna and privy which was on the other side of a small ravine. He proposed the construction of a suspension rope bridge for practical use and dramatic effect. Steve designed the bridge and a friend of his (Greg) who worked for Yale Cordage, a rope manufacturing company in Saco, handled the splicing. When Greg told Yale Cordage about the rope bridge project in northern Maine, they donated a spool of rope to the endeavor. (It was a synthetic product they had just discontinued but we didn’t mind, the price was right.) To get a head start, Greg completed the T-splices for the handrails in Portland and when he arrived he trained the volunteer crew to hand splice and we helped complete the rest of the project with his supervision.  

The rope bridge was 75 feet long and made up of 150 rough-cut white cedar 2X6 planks. We used a drill press and jig to drill holes through the planks that the rope runners and hand rail loops passed through (we burned out two drills in the process).  Some assembly required… We also shot video footage of the rope bridge construction project on a VHS camera from the era. The working title of the VHS documentary was “Rope Bridge-A-Go-Go…”  I went digging through the attic last week to see if I could find it (I hadn’t watched it in over 25 years) and I did! I popped it in to our old AC-DC portable TV/VCR player, which still works, and there it was. The tape was 45 minutes of unedited material shot without a tripod or stabilization feature, poor sound quality and erratic framing. But it was perfect. I’ve attempted to edit parts of it into a short semi-coherent production. My low tech method is to use my handheld iPhone to directly record the TV/VCR while it’s playing. The problem I ran into is that when I zoomed in close to the screen to frame the shot, the iPhone distorted the image which required me to back off. That being said, it’s not a Tik-Tok quality shoot, but it does get the material in a digital format and it’s footage I haven’t seen in over 25 years. I’ve included the new editor’s cut  in today’s post so you can see it for yourself. 

Upon finishing the project, Steve said, “This bridge comes with a ten-year warranty.”  Well, I gotta say we did pretty well on that end, but it’s still hard to come to terms with the inevitablitly of demise. The rope bridge photo will still remain on the home page of the blog, even though it is now gone. Call me nostalgic, I don’t mind, but I can’t let that go just yet. Memories, photos and stories are a part of us that we carry no matter where we go or how many years may have passed. And we continue on…

In the woods,

Dave

August 7, 2024

The drill press ”jig” in action prepping the planks (Tor Smith)

Running the planks…

Steve evaluating the bridge with the Hutchinson boys…

The new rope bridge  (notice the splices have not yet been trimmed)

The end of an era…

The last turnbuckle (2024)