Tuesday Morning, May 27, 2014
For our first full day downunder, I reserved a 10:00 am Bridge Climb on the Iconic Sydney Harbor Bridge. In typical market positioning, it's the "largest single span steel bridge in the world". Well, it was, but is no longer the longest, or the widest, but it does carry the most traffic so they continue the pitch. Eight lanes of traffic, a pedestrian and cycle way, and two train tracks. It's width definitely gives monumentality to it. When it was designed nobody could understand why it needed to be so wide since Sydney only had 600,000 people. Now, at over 4.5 million, there are several bridges, a tunnel, and a plan to build another crossing.
Regardless of it's ranking it is a beautiful engineering and architectural structure. Like many of the infrastructure projects started just before or during the depression this has a wonderful Art Deco detail and scale about it. This is the same era as the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. Back then many engineers were architects, or visa versa. Unlike the Golden Gate where the abutments are the anchors for the suspension cables, the four pylons at each end corner are not structural. These pylons are purley aesthetic as the span is a simple one. The engineer fought for them as needing to anchor the ends visually, if not structurally. It would not be as beautiful without them. They are clad in 40,000 hand carved local sandstone blocks, another costly feature he insisted on over the less expensive raw concrete. Not one had to be adjusted on site to fit. Likewise when the two cantelivered arches met in the middle they aligned perfectly. In contrast their most recent bridge was off by 4'.
Our Bridge climb group was 13. It began by undressing - privately thank god. Some people you just don't want to see that way. We then went through an orchestrated process of doning jumpsuits, attaching a harness, managing our teather by practicing on steep stairs, and finally begin wired for sound. It reminded me our my climbing days. "Belay On!" Once the group was assembled we slid our teather onto to a continuous SS cable that ran from our secure start inside, across the approach span to the pylons, up four flights of steep stairs to the top of the span, across the arch of the bridge, crossed over at mid-span, and down the other side. Once hooked up you could not unhook, change position, or take the call of nature. It was very well controled because, as we know, some idiot would surely unhook "just to get a better photo". At the top we were 134 meters (440 feet) above the water.
Geared for the lowest common demoninator the whole process took two and a half hours. I found out later that they had a Fast Tour that is done in about an hour and a half.
View of Central Quay and the central business district from the top of Harbor Bridge. Opera house just off to left and our hotel to the right.
On return we had a pleasant lunch in The Rocks and then headed to the Opera House for our prescheduled tour.
Next Post: Iconic Site Number 2 - Sydney Opera House
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