High Level Bridge

Standing on the floor of the Oldman River valley and looking up at the High Level Bridge, many people feel the same thing: a mixture of surprise that something so long and so tall exists, and a sense of how small they are beneath it. The bridge, officially the Lethbridge Viaduct, carries a Canadian Pacific Railway line across the coulee at the edge of Lethbridge, Alberta, on a steel trestle roughly 1.6 kilometres long and about 96 metres high. When it was completed in 1909, it was the longest and highest bridge of its type in the world, and it remains one of Lethbridge’s great landmarks and one of the great engineering monuments of the Canadian prairies.

The railway built it for practical reasons. Lethbridge was a coal-mining town, and the Canadian Pacific Railway wanted a more direct route west toward the mountain passes without the long descent into the river valley and back up the other side. Between 1907 and 1909, crews working with steel girders, cranes and a vast number of rivets raised the bridge span by span, with dozens of tall steel towers, each standing on concrete piers. The work involved large crews during harsh prairie weather, and the result has stood for over a century with regular maintenance and strengthening.

Trains still cross the bridge today, so the structure is not a museum piece but a working part of the rail network, and visitors may see a freight train moving slowly along the deck, a spectacle in itself. There is no public deck, as the bridge is a private railway structure and is not open for pedestrians. Instead, people view it from several places, including the west end of 3rd Avenue South and Scenic Drive, and from the paths in Indian Battle Park below, where the full length of the trestle can be seen against the sky. Sunrise and sunset give the best light, when the steel catches the colour and the long shadows stretch across the valley.

Around the bridge the Oldman River Valley offers walking trails, a lookout, and sites including Fort Whoop-Up, a reconstruction of a whisky trading post from the 1860s and 1870s. The Nikka Yuko Japanese Garden is nearby on the other side of the valley.

Viewing the bridge is free, and there are no hours for looking at it from public areas. It is a favourite stop for photographers, engineering enthusiasts and anyone interested in the history of the railway in western Canada.