Construction of a 700-ft-long footbridge—cantilevered out on 20 steel beams and clinging to the side of a canyon in North Vancouver, British Columbia—has been an adrenaline-pumping building project that, when finished, will leave tourists breathless. Visitors to the Capilano Suspension Bridge & Park will be able to view the surrounding Canadian rainforest from a galvanized steel walkway with a 20-in.-wide timber deck, which is suspended 300 ft above the canyon floor and attached to a granite cliff face up to 20 ft away.
It was difficult to even find a starting point for the design of the unique cliff-hanging attraction, says Kent LaRose, formerly the project’s structural engineer with McElhanney Consulting Services Ltd., Surrey, British Columbia, now with Vancouver’s Morrison Hershfield Ltd. For example, engineering an alignment on 200 vertical ft of rock required examining 12 different options during the process, he says. Nevertheless, despite these challenges, one of the project’s goals was to minimize the bridge’s environmental footprint, which ended up being less than 120 sq ft, LaRose adds.