Students build two bridges for the 21st century on Finger Lakes Trail

By Linda Myers

There's something about a bridge that speaks to us of permanence, hope, the future. Bridges are a favorite image for filmmakers, songwriters and presidents, who have suggested that constructing one builds morale among imprisoned soldiers and that bridges help people pass over troubled waters and move seamlessly into the 21st century.

Kurt Seitz, left, Cayuga Trails Club trails chair, and Dan Mullins '00, M.Eng. '01, assemble the first truss, Oct. 22, for two pedestrian bridges along a Connecticut Hill hiking trail in Schuyler County. Charles Harrington/University Photography

Now, two pedestrian truss bridges are being built by Cornell engineering students and community members that will make some of the most stunning scenery in the Finger Lakes accessible to hikers year-round. Late last spring the Cayuga Trails Club, a local group that organizes trail maintenance and offers guided hikes on the Finger Lakes Trail, dedicated a new loop in the trail and asked the Cornell student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers to design and help build and install two new bridges along the scenic Cayuta Gulf portion of the trail in Schuyler County.

"The gulf trail traverses the wildest, most remote parts of the Connecticut Hill State Wildlife Management area, as evidenced by my happening across four bears along the trail when I explored it last March," said Kurt Seitz, trails chair for Cayuga Trails and a prime mover on the project.

The bridges were designed by Dan Mullins and Mike Tavolaro, two fifth-year Cornell M.Eng. students who were seniors in the College of Engineering when they began the project last spring. Both of them are fascinated by bridges, and Mullins leads wilderness survival and backpacking trips for Cornell Outdoor Education and had done trail maintenance before.

The bridges will cross two streams that frequently run high and swiftly, making them dangerous or impossible to cross, said Seitz. Once they are built, "the bridges will bring hikers to the incredible beauty and uniqueness of the Cayuta Gulf and the areas to its northeast. The trail takes advantage of an old roadbed that once ran through the gulf. It goes past an old farm site with an existing well that could potentially be used by hikers, through a mature Norway spruce plantation, a section of huge trees and along one of the prettiest streams I've seen on the Finger Lakes Trail."

Cayuga Trails is paying for all the materials for the bridges, which include about 100 steel plates and four 1,600-pound trusses made from black locust wood. Mullins says black locust is much more ecologically sound than pressure-treated wood and also is very rot resistant.

"Fence posts made out of it survive over a hundred years," he said.

Timber beams were cut to the correct lengths and over 1,000 holes were drilled in the wood and the steel plates by undergraduate volunteers in the College of Engineering's Winter Lab and the Hollister machine shop. The bridge trusses were preassembled in the Hollister parking lot to make sure everything fit, then disassembled for transporting.

The materials were trucked to the site Oct. 21. The work on the bridges began the following day and is continuing on consecutive weekends through mid-November. The trusses have been reassembled near the sites and pulled and lifted onto the concrete abutments that were constructed by the volunteers. Builders include Mullins, Tavolaro, engineering undergraduates Courtney Kimball, Dave Saunders and about 25 other Cornell students and members of Cayuga Trails, among them Seitz and Cayuga Trails president Suzanne Cohen. Cohen is the reference services coordinator for the Martin P. Catherwood Library at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

Cayuga Trails earns modest revenues for trail maintenance and other projects from its Guide to Trails of the Finger Lakes. A new edition goes on sale this December at local bookstores and makes a great holiday gift, said Cohen. For more information visit the club's web site, http://www.lightlink.com/ctc and the Cornell student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers' web site: http://www.cee.cornell.edu/asce/bridgepage.htm.