In the autumn of 1932, a carpenter named Refugio Méndez stood on a wooden platform 160 feet above the floor of Carrizo Gorge. He looked out through the open framework of a bridge that had not yet been built and would not be completed for another four months, and he felt the canyon winds rising from the desert floor below with enough force to push his body sideways on the platform without warning. He was working in the Anza-Borrego desert of Southern California, in a gorge that the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway had been trying to cross with trains for twenty years. The gorge is 2,000 feet deep at its widest point and runs eleven miles through the Peninsular Ranges between the floor of the Imperial Valley and the coastal plain at San Diego.
The railroad had already crossed the gorge once, in 1919, over a wooden trestle that had taken two years to build. But that bridge burned to the ground in the afternoon of a single day in 1926, six months after it opened, when a spark from a passing locomotive fell onto the wooden structure. The desert air finished the job in less time than it took the fire crew to arrive from the nearest station. The railroad needed to rebuild the bridge.
It had already been rebuilt once, hastily and temporarily, and that temporary structure was now on the verge of collapse. What Refugio Méndez was doing, 160 feet above the gorge floor in the autumn of 1932, was building the permanent replacement: a curved wooden trestle, 787 feet long and 185 feet high at its tallest point. That height is the equivalent of an eighteen-story building from its base to the rail it carries. It was erected over a desert canyon in the second year of the Great Depression by men who were paid in company scrip and housed in tents, men who had no practical alternative but to accept those terms, because the alternative was the Imperial Valley labor market of 1932, which was worse.
The bridge he was building is still there. It is called the Goat Canyon Trestle. It is, according to everyone who has measured it, the tallest remaining curved wooden railroad trestle in the United States, and by most accounts the tallest curved wooden railroad trestle ever built. You cannot reach it by car.
You cannot see it from any road. The railroad that built it went bankrupt in 1933, one year after the bridge was completed, and the line through Carrizo Gorge has been out of regular service since 1976. To reach the trestle today, you must walk fourteen miles through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park on a trail that is not paved for ordinary use, a walk that requires a permit and a degree of desert navigation that most people who want to see the bridge discover they do not possess until they are already several miles from the trailhead. The men who built it have no memorial at the trailhead.
The wooden trestle is what has the memorial at the trailhead. Those men exist in the employment records kept by the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway in 1932, in whatever form those records survived the bankruptcy proceedings of 1933, the subsequent corporate reorganization, and the ninety-two years since the last pile was driven. This is the story of how they built it, what it cost, and why that cost is not in the official narrative. To understand why a railroad needed to cross Carrizo Gorge at all, you have to understand what the gorge was and what lay on both sides of it.
San Diego at the beginning of the twentieth century was a coastal city with a harbor and a naval installation, and a population growing at a rate the existing rail lines could not serve efficiently. The Southern Pacific Railroad, which controlled the main rail line between San Diego and the rest of the country, routed its traffic north through Los Angeles. Any shipper in San Diego who wanted to move goods east across the Southwest had to ship north to Los Angeles first, then east through the San Bernardino Pass. That route added hundreds of miles and a Southern Pacific monopoly surcharge to every ton moving through San Diego.
John D. Spreckels, who owned the San Diego Union-Tribune and much of the commercial real estate in downtown San Diego, and who had a financial stake in San Diego’s competitive position that made the money a personal matter, recognized that the solution to the Southern Pacific monopoly was a competing rail line running directly east from San Diego through the mountains to the Imperial Valley. There it could connect with Southern Pacific’s transcontinental routes at Yuma and give San Diego shippers a direct route east that did not pass through Los Angeles at all. The engineering problem was the mountains between San Diego and the Imperial Valley.
The Peninsular Ranges run north-south along the eastern edge of San Diego’s coastal plain, rising to between 5,000 and 6,000 feet before dropping abruptly to the floor of the Imperial Valley at elevations below sea level. The drop from the crest of the range to the valley floor covers a linear distance of about thirty miles and a change in elevation of 6,000 feet. Railroad grade requirements demanded either a very long route to reduce the steepness of the slope, or a direct route with grades steep enough to challenge the locomotives of the early twentieth century. The most direct route through the mountains, which Spreckels’s engineers identified as a practical line, ran through Carrizo Gorge, a canyon carved by Carrizo Creek through the eastern face of the Peninsular Ranges over millions of years of intermittent flooding.
The canyon was narrow and steep-walled, full of blind curves that put the railroad alignment in direct confrontation with the canyon walls at several points. The engineers counted seventeen tunnels required in the gorge section alone. They considered Goat Canyon a separate problem of a different kind from the tunnels, because a tunnel is a hole in rock, and rock is a material that can be understood. A bridge rising 185 feet above the floor of a desert canyon is a problem in wooden engineering over an empty space that is worth considering from the perspective of a man who might fall into it.
Construction of the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway began in 1907 and proceeded amid the intermittent financial difficulties that characterized most American railroad construction projects of that period. Spreckels had enough money to start the line. He did not have unlimited money to finish it on a schedule dictated by engineering complexity rather than cash flow, and Carrizo Gorge was the most complex section of the hardest stretch of railroad. The tunnels alone required years of drilling and blasting through rock that geologists described as hard and that the diggers found harder.
The Carrizo Gorge section was the last section of the railroad to be completed. The railroad reached Yuma and its connection with the Southern Pacific in 1919, twelve years after construction began, at a total cost that far exceeded the estimates the engineers had given Spreckels when he committed to the project in the early years of the century. The first Goat Canyon Trestle was completed in 1919 as part of the final push to close the last gap in the Carrizo Gorge section. It was built of Douglas fir timber frames, the standard material for wooden railroad bridges in the American West in the early twentieth century, because that lumber came in the required sizes with the required strength in compression, and because it was cut from the forests of the Pacific Northwest and shipped by sea to San Diego in the quantities the construction demanded.
The first bridge lasted six years. In 1925, a spark from a locomotive ignited the timber frames. The fire spread through the dry desert air faster than wooden structures burn in wetter climates, and the bridge was gone before the fire crew could arrive. The railroad rebuilt.
A second bridge was rushed into service to restore traffic across the canyon. It was built with the speed that emergency work requires, without the full engineering review that any permanent structure demands. It served its purpose. It was not built to last.
By 1931, the second bridge was deteriorating at a rate that railroad maintenance crews assessed as unacceptable for continued service under freight train loads, and the railroad’s engineering department began designing a permanent replacement. The engineering department of the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway in 1931 was not a large organization. Neither was the railroad itself. Its track ran 148 miles.
Its traffic depended on the agricultural and industrial freight of the Imperial Valley and the commercial traffic of the Port of San Diego. It was not profitable in the sense that transcontinental railroads calculated their profits. But it was necessary in the sense that John Spreckels had understood when he committed to building it: it gave San Diego a rail outlet that did not pass through Southern Pacific’s Los Angeles hub. The existence of that outlet had material value to San Diego shippers regardless of whether the railroad earned a return on the capital invested in its construction.
The design of the permanent replacement for the Goat Canyon Trestle followed the engineering logic that had governed the original. Douglas fir structures, bent framing, the same curve alignment that the canyon demanded, with a rail height of 185 feet above the canyon floor at the highest point. The curve was not optional. The canyon walls at Goat Canyon forced the track to take a curve of approximately ten degrees as the railroad threaded its way between the western canyon wall and the narrow terrace above the stream.
Building a straight bridge at that site would have required either cutting into the canyon wall from the west side or extending the bridge south to a point where the canyon was wide enough for a straight crossing. Neither option was economically justified. So the curve was in the design from the first drawing. Building a curved wooden bridge is harder than building a straight one, for reasons that may not be immediately obvious to someone who has never built wooden bridges.
A straight bridge is based on repetition. The bents, the vertical structural units that carry deck loads to the foundations, are identical from one end to the other except where the ground elevation changes. The connections are identical. The lengths of members are equal.
A crew that builds the first bent correctly has a template for every bent that follows. A curved bridge has no such repetition. Each bent sits on a radius slightly different from the one that preceded it. The cap, the horizontal beam at the top of each bent that carries the stringers and rails, must be cut at an angle that matches the curvature at that particular point in the track.
The stringers spanning between bents must account for the chord distance across the curve in each section. The connections must be designed to work at the angle the curve imposes at each location. The carpenter who cuts the wrong angle into a cap timber has wasted the cutting effort and the cost of the lumber and must start over on a new piece. At a height of 185 feet, cutting a timber to the wrong dimensions, lowering it to the ground, and raising the correct piece back up to the work platform is not a simple operation.
The lumber for the Goat Canyon Trestle was Douglas fir, as it had been for the original. It was shipped by rail from the Pacific Northwest to San Diego, then brought by a narrow-gauge work train into the canyon along the existing railroad track south of the bridge site. The dimensions were what wooden bridge engineering of the period demanded: 12-by-12 and 14-by-14 inch cap timbers, 6-by-8 and 8-by-10 inch stringers, 10-by-10 and 12-by-12 inch posts for the bent frames, and heavy timber sills for the foundation bents where the rock permitted direct loading. The bolts were iron drift pins driven through pre-drilled holes, and the connections were made with the iron hardware specified by the engineering drawings.
Getting those materials to the floor of Carrizo Gorge and then raising them to the required height for the frames was the first and fundamental problem of construction, and it was a problem that the canyon’s isolation made much harder than it would have been at a road-accessible site. The men who built the Goat Canyon Trestle in 1932 came from the labor force that the Imperial Valley supplied to San Diego County in the second year of the Great Depression. They were mostly Mexican and Mexican-American laborers. The Imperial Valley in the early 1930s had one of the largest concentrations of Mexican agricultural labor in the United States, a workforce that had come north during the two decades of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath of agricultural labor migration, to fill the demand for field labor in the valley’s irrigated agriculture, which grew cotton, cantaloupe, and lettuce and required large numbers of workers in the harvest seasons, paying wages set by the growers and accepted by the workers because the alternative was returning to a Mexico that offered less.
Railroad construction work paid better than field work. It was harder, more dangerous, and intermittent, but the daily wage of a construction laborer in 1932 was higher than that of an agricultural worker, even in a year when construction wages were falling with the rest of the economy. The men who applied for work on the Goat Canyon Trestle replacement in the summer of 1932 were people for whom the construction wage, whatever it was in that year, represented an improvement over what the valley’s agricultural economy was offering. The railroad paid in the currency that the Depression economy had made common among employers who recognized that their workers had no practical choice: company scrip redeemable at the company store instead of the cash wages that the railroad’s treasury, strapped by the shrinkage of freight traffic in 1932, preferred to defer.
The scrip was legal. It was common practice. It was an arrangement that returned part of the wage to the employer through the profit margin on goods that could be purchased with scrip at the company store compared to the cost of the same goods at a general store in El Centro or Brawley where cash was accepted. Whether the men who built the Goat Canyon Trestle understood the scrip arrangement before they arrived at the work camp in Carrizo Gorge or discovered it upon arrival is a question that the employment records might answer if they still exist.
What the arrangement meant in practical terms was that a man who spent three months in the canyon building the bridge at 160 feet above the canyon floor in the heat of a California summer and the winds of its autumn left the work with less purchasing power than his nominal wage indicated. The work camp was inside the canyon. The canyon offered no permanent settlement of any kind. The camp was tents on the canyon floor near the bridge site, with cooking facilities sufficient to feed a crew of the size the construction demanded, and water hauled by tanker cars on the work train from the nearest reliable source outside the canyon.
The Imperial Valley summer of 1932 was what it always is. Temperatures exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade most days between June and September, with shade a limited resource on the floor of a desert canyon where the walls block direct sun for parts of the day but do not reduce the radiated heat absorbed by the rocks and re-emitted onto the men living among them through the night. The men working on the elevated platforms of the bridge under construction were not on the canyon floor. They were in direct sunlight for the entire workday when the sun was above the canyon walls, which covered most of the working hours in summer.
A platform 100 feet above the canyon floor, on the west-facing side of a bridge in the Anza-Borrego desert in July, is a platform with no shade and no air movement, except for the thermal winds generated by the heated canyon walls in the afternoon, which arrive at sufficient speed to push a man who does not expect them. The tools were iron and wood. The iron components of the rigging hardware were hot enough in the direct August sun to raise blisters on the hands of anyone who touched them without gloves. The men wore gloves.
The gloves were cloth and leather, absorbing the sweat of the hands inside them, then drying and stiffening and cracking, and being replaced when the railroad’s supply allowed. The danger of falling at the heights required by the Goat Canyon Trestle construction was the condition that made all other conditions secondary. A man working on a wooden platform 130 feet above the floor of a rocky canyon is working at a height from which no fall can be survived under any ordinary circumstances. The canyon floor was not water, as it was for the pile-driving barges on Lake Pontchartrain where a fall was a manageable situation if rescue came quickly.
The canyon floor was rock and the dry bed of Carrizo Creek, which was carrying no water at all in the summer of 1932. The safety technology available to a construction worker in 1932 was a rope tied to a timber. There were no safety harnesses of the design that OSHA standards would later require. There were no fall-arrest systems.
There were ropes. Whether a man tied himself off depended on whether the task he was performing allowed it, and on whether the foreman’s standard for the crew included that requirement. The foreman’s standard reflected what the industry considered normal in 1932, which was that men worked at heights on wooden platforms and sometimes fell, and the industry accepted that as part of the conditions of work. The records of falls at the Goat Canyon Trestle construction site do not appear in any publicly available source.
The railroad went bankrupt in 1933. The bankruptcy reorganization produced a new legal entity and a new set of corporate records. What survived of the original construction records through the reorganization and the subsequent ownership changes in the following decades is unproven in the published accounts. The names of the men who fell, if any did, are not in those accounts.
The names of the men who did not fall are not in those accounts either. The bridge is in those accounts. The bridge is what those accounts were written to document. The sequence of construction of the new Goat Canyon Trestle began with the foundation bents at the canyon walls from both the north and south ends, working toward the middle where the height was at its greatest and the complications of the curve demanded the most effort.
The foundation bent is the lowest structural unit of the bridge, the unit that transfers the load of the bent above it to the ground. At the canyon walls, the rock was close enough to the surface that foundation sills could be set directly on the rock face with minimal excavation. In the middle of the canyon, where the canyon floor was softer sediment over bedrock, deposited over centuries since the last major flood scoured the channel, the foundations required more preparation. The soil samples taken by the engineers before the final design was set showed that the canyon floor material was suitable for the loads the bridge would place on it, provided the footings were sized according to the bearing capacity of the material.
The footings were sized accordingly. The bent construction used the same system that the railroad bridge industry had developed over half a century of building bridges across the American West. A wooden hand-cranked derrick at the top of the elevated structure, powered by horses on the canyon floor below, lifted frame components through a system of pulleys from the supply pile to the height at which the carpenters worked. The wooden derrick was the technology.
The horses were the power source. A four-horse team operating the derrick in 1932 could lift about 1,500 pounds to a height of 150 feet at a rate determined by the engineering of the pulley system. A 14-by-14 inch timber sill thirty feet long weighs about 1,800 pounds. Moving it from the supply pile on the canyon floor to the framing platform at 130 feet required two lifts by the horse-powered derrick at the bridge’s average height, and required the carpenters on the platform to guide the timber into position while it swung on the derrick hook with whatever wind was blowing through the canyon at that moment.
The canyon winds were not predictable. They came from the south in the morning as the desert heated and the air rose, pulling cooler air from the coast through the lower part of the canyon, then from the north in the afternoon as the thermal pattern reversed. The winds moved an 1,800-pound timber hanging from the derrick hook. The men on the platform guided it with wooden poles and their hands, and with the experience they had gained on previous bridge projects.
When the wind was strong enough that guiding the timber was beyond skill and became a matter of luck, the derrick was stopped, the timber lowered, and the crew waited. The waiting was not paid. The construction contract, as was customary for contracts of that period, specified payment for work performed, and weather delays were conditions borne by the contractor, not the railroad. A man who waited two hours in the canyon heat for the afternoon thermal winds to die down before the derrick could be restarted and the timber placed was a man who had spent two hours in the sun on a wooden platform above a rocky canyon, unpaid for his waiting and for his exposure to those conditions.
The mortar used for the masonry footings was hydraulic cement, as it had been for the Starrucca Bridge eighty years earlier, and as it still is for any construction in a water-adjacent environment where ordinary lime mortar cannot dry reliably. The cement was brought into the canyon by the work train and mixed at the footing sites with water hauled from the tanker car. The mixing was done by hand, as it was done at remote construction sites in 1932, in wooden mixing boxes with iron shovels by laborers classified on the payroll as ordinary workers, and their wages reflected that classification. The curved deck of the wooden bridge required stringers and cap timbers cut at angles that the carpenter had to transfer from the engineering drawings to the lumber itself with precision, without the benefit of the digital tools that later generations of builders would use for this process.
The drawings showed the angle. The carpenter marked the angle on the face of the timber with a framing square and a pencil line, then cut it with a handsaw or a two-man crosscut saw, depending on the dimensions and the workspace available at the site. Sawing through a 14-by-14 inch Douglas fir cap timber with a two-man saw took several minutes of sustained effort by two experienced men. If the cut was made at the wrong angle, those minutes were lost and the timber was lost as well.
At a height of up to 185 feet at the highest point, the consequences of cutting wood incorrectly were multiplied by the cost of transporting any replacement to the work site. The supply chain brought materials to the canyon floor. The horse-powered derrick raised materials from the canyon floor to the framing platform. A timber that had to be lowered and raised again after being corrected consumed the effort of the horses, the work of the carpenters, and the time of a workday that the construction schedule had not accounted for, a schedule that the railroad’s engineering management was monitoring against the deterioration of the temporary bridge that the permanent structure was replacing.
Engineering supervision on site was provided by the railroad’s own engineering staff, under the chief engineer of the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway. Whether the level of on-site supervision was continuous or periodic is not established in the accounts available to the public. The construction work was performed by a contractor, and the division of responsibility between the contractor’s superintendent and the railroad’s engineering staff for day-to-day construction quality was the division specified by the contract. What the contract specified has not been published in a form readily accessible to historical researchers.
What the completed bridge showed, when the permanent structure was finished and the work train crossed it with its load for the first time in late 1932, was that the angles had been cut correctly, that the curve had been built to the radius specified by the drawings, and that the rails ran smoothly across 787 feet of timber framing without the alignment errors that would have resulted from a wrong cut in the cap timber or a bent out of plumb. The structure carried the working loads imposed by the railroad. The curve was correct. The frames were sound.
The men who made the structure sound are not in the photographs taken at completion. The completion photographs, if they exist and if they are preserved in a form accessible to researchers, show the bridge. Whether those photographs show the men who built it, and whether those workers were the kind of people that supervisors and railroad management considered appropriate to document in completion photographs, is a question about 1932, and that year’s answer is evident in the systematic absence of Mexican and Mexican-American construction workers from the official documentary records of infrastructure projects in the Southwest during that decade. The San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway went bankrupt in November 1933, thirteen months after the Goat Canyon Trestle was completed.
The bankruptcy was not caused by the bridge. The bankruptcy was caused by the collapse of freight volume and freight rates in the Great Depression, which made the economic viability of operating a short 148-mile desert railroad unsustainable against the debt service on the capital the railroad had consumed to build it. The bridge faced no such crisis. The bridge was complete.
It was carrying train loads. It was doing what it was built to do and would continue to do regardless of what the railroad’s financial condition was in the courts. The bankruptcy reorganization produced a reorganized company that continued to operate the line. The line through Carrizo Gorge continued in service under various ownerships and reorganizations through the middle decades of the twentieth century.
The agricultural and industrial freight of the Imperial Valley continued to move east through San Diego on the route that John Spreckels had committed to building in the early years of the century, and that the men in Carrizo Gorge had made possible by digging seventeen tunnels through rock and raising a curved wooden bridge 185 feet above the canyon floor. In 1976, a flood on Carrizo Creek caused severe damage to parts of the railroad through the gorge. The cost of repair exceeded what the line’s then-owner considered justified by the traffic revenue. The line through Carrizo Gorge was taken out of service.
It has not returned to regular service since. The trestle was not damaged in the 1976 flood. The trestle stood above the flood level. The trestle stood while the railroad beneath it stopped operating.
The trestle has stood since, through the desert summers and winters, and the flash floods that sometimes sweep the canyon when summer monsoon winds bring enough rain to the watershed above to produce a flow faster than the canyon floor can absorb. Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, which encompasses the land around the trestle, has managed the site since the line went out of service. The trestle lies within the park boundaries. Access on foot is permitted.
The fourteen-mile round trip to the trestle is long, and the desert terrain is difficult enough that the number of people who reach it in a given year is small compared to those who express interest in reaching it. The people who do reach it find a wooden trestle 185 feet high and 787 feet long, which has stood in a desert canyon for ninety-two years without the maintenance that a structure in active railroad service would have received. The wood has weathered. The iron has corroded.
The framing remains sound in its structural configuration. The curve remains what the engineers drew and the carpenters built in 1932. The desert preserves wood better than a wet climate does. Rainfall in the Anza-Borrego desert is very low in most years.
The timber produced by the Douglas fir forests of the Pacific Northwest in the 1930s, cut to the dimensions the frame required, bound with iron bolts by men who were paid in scrip and housed in tents on the canyon floor, has lasted ninety-two years in a climate as harsh on human comfort as it is suited to the long-term preservation of timber. Douglas fir still does what it does when it is dry and protected from the mechanical damage imposed by traffic loads. It holds its shape under the compressive load of its own weight. The joints are the weakest elements at this age.
The drift pins corrode. When a drift pin corrodes completely, the joint it held begins to move under wind loads and thermal expansion and contraction. The park manages what it can manage. The trestle is not a maintained structure in the sense that an active railroad bridge is maintained.
It is a historic structure in a remote desert park accessible on foot, managed for preservation rather than operation. If you walk the fourteen miles to Goat Canyon Trestle today, which requires a permit from Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and a level of physical fitness that the desert does not forgive those who lack, you will arrive at a structure that looks visually different from any wooden construction you have seen in your life. The curve is the first thing you notice. A straight wooden trestle at that height is impressive as any eighteen-story wooden structure.
A curved wooden trestle at that height is a different thing, because the curve makes the engineering choice visible and explicit. This structure is here because the canyon walls imposed it, and the men who built it accepted the complications the canyon imposed, incorporating the curve into every top timber, every brace connection, every frame over the 787 feet of the bridge’s length. The second thing is the size of the timbers. The top timbers are 14 by 14 inches in cross-section, a size larger than most people who have not worked in heavy timber construction will ever encounter.
They are not like the standard 2-by-4 and 2-by-6 framing lumber of residential construction. They are structural members of a bridge designed to carry loaded freight trains, and their size reflects what that heavy task requires. The third thing, which you notice when you stand at the bridge long enough to stop contemplating the structure and start contemplating the place, is that the desert is as silent as remote places are when no mechanical equipment is operating in their vicinity. The canyon carries the sounds of wind and birds and the occasional movement of the creek when it runs.
It carries no sound that the men who built this bridge in 1932 would not have been familiar with. Those men drove massive iron bolts through pre-drilled Douglas fir frames 160 feet above the canyon floor. They did it with wooden derricks and pulleys and simple carpentry tools and their bare hands. They did it in the heat of the Anza-Borrego desert summer and in the canyon winds that came up from the desert floor in the afternoons without warning, moving the timbers they were trying to guide into place.
They were paid in scrip. They lived in tents. Their names are not at the trailhead. The bridge they built in thirteen months still stands after ninety-two years in a desert canyon, where almost nothing else built by human hands in 1932 has survived the passage of the decades intact.
The foundation material under the footings has not moved. The Douglas fir frames they cut at the angles the curve demanded have never changed their curved shape. The iron bolts corrode at the rate iron corrodes in a dry alkaline environment, a rate slow enough that what these men built together, the men whose names are not at the trailhead and the engineers whose names are recorded in the railroad’s design records, remains a structure recognizable as exactly what they built. The canyon does not know the railroad went bankrupt.
The canyon does not know that the scrip paid as wages to the men was worth less than its face value at the company store. The canyon knows what it has always known: that it is two thousand feet deep, that the winds blow up from the desert floor in the afternoon, and that the rock walls radiate the heat they have stored all day back into the air above them through the night. The wooden bridge is curved because the canyon walls imposed it. The men who cut the curve into the timbers are in the payroll records of a bankrupt railroad, if those records survived the ninety-two years between the autumn of 1932 and today.
The wooden trestle is still there.
