A while back my friend Zenmaster and I went down to the Stockton Lake area to survey some of the damage done by last year’s drought before the Spring rains completely wash it away. Our first stop was the Sac River. In particular, I wanted to check out a couple of abandoned bridges we spotted on earlier canoe trips.

The first we came to was an old iron bridge connecting Wishart and Aldrich, no longer in service. The first thing we noticed upon our arrival was just how low the water level really was – Zenmaster spotted an engine block beached on the riverbank, and upon pointing it out I noticed the rest of the car, sitting smack dab in the middle of the river. We had rowed right over it on previous occasions without ever even noticing.

The actual bridge is nice, but not terribly interesting. One side can be approached by car, while the other is inaccessible. However, about a mile of road is still mostly intact on the other side. We later found where it was supposed to connect to another road still in service, but the way had been blocked by several large boulders. The bridge itself was blocked by piles of debris, not that I would want to try and drive across it; there are holes big enough to fall through. Diving was also out of the question – the water looked to be a few feet deep, max. After wandering across the bridge a time or two we were reading to head north to Stockton.

Our second former bridge sits on the eastern end of the lake, within a waterfowl refuge, with its newer replacement within eyeshot.

A former bridge in the truest sense, all that remain are two large stone pilings, about 15-20 ft tall, normally sitting in the middle of the lake and far out of reach from the shore. I say “normally,” because it just so happened that during our last visit one of the two pilings was accessible by foot. I had waited years to climb it, and I knew this might be my only chance. We drove down a back road towards the bridge, and were able to drive almost right up to it, on what had previously been the lake bed.

I got out my trusty homemade grappling hook (which in no way compare’s to WR’s and has a nasty habit of coming apart in midair), and we started taking turns. After about 40-50 tries we got it to stick and, relatively confident that it was going to stay in one place, I started climbing. It wasn’t a difficult climb. The only troubling part was that, while the pillar was surrounded by mud on two sides and water on one, a large stone slab had fallen just below my starting point, which meant that if I fell I’d have a pretty hard spot to land on.

As often happens, I reached the top to find my rope barely hanging in a crack, not because of my hook which had once again been proven worthless, but because the knot had been too large to fit through. This was a blessing later on, however, as it made the rope easier to remove from ground level.

After hanging around for a while and taking pictures I made it down without incident. It wasn’t until we started to leave that I noticed a problem. That problem was I had parked in what was essentially the still damp lake bed. Add to that the fact that it was raining already and my truck isn’t exactly a powerhouse, and I found myself hopelessly stuck.

Being more or less out of options, we started trekking through the woods in search of help. We found what looked like an overgrown road, and followed that until we reached a proper road. As luck would have it, a car happened to pass by just in time to see us emerge from the wilderness. It just so happened he was a farmer who lived less than a half mile away, and freely offered us the use of his tractor. In fact he said not to sweat it, that this sort of thing happens all the time. When we got back to the lake he pointed out a pre-existing set of tire tracks, saying he had to pull someone else just a few weeks earlier.

Knowing that I was just one of many dumbasses didn’t really help my ego at the time, but looking back I can say I was finally able to accomplish something that had been gnawing at me for years, and at the same time I gained an interesting anecdote, and one can never have too many of those.