Kinzua Bridge State Park

The Kinzua Viaduct was built in 1882 to carry a railroad across a broad, deep valley in northern Pennsylvania, saving a long detour around it. When it opened it was celebrated as one of the tallest railroad bridges in the world, an iron marvel of the age, and it drew sightseers even then. It was rebuilt in steel around the turn of the century to carry heavier modern trains, standing hundreds of feet above the valley floor. Rail traffic across it eventually ended, and by the late twentieth century the viaduct had become a state park attraction, with an excursion train crossing it and visitors walking its length for the view. In the early 2000s it was closed for restoration, with crews working to shore up its aging towers. Then, in July 2003, a tornado swept up the valley and struck the viaduct directly.

The storm tore several of the great towers from their concrete bases and hurled them to the ground, leaving the surviving half standing and the rest scattered in a tangle of twisted steel below. Engineers later found that the anchor bolts holding the towers had corroded, and the state chose to preserve the ruin as a monument to both the engineering that built it and the storm that broke it.

The surviving portion of the viaduct was rebuilt as a pedestrian skywalk. Visitors can walk out along the span to the point where the tornado tore it away, following the old railbed high above the valley. At the far end, a partial glass floor lets you look straight down to the ground far below, a vertigo-inducing view that draws gasps and dares.

From the end of the walk you look out over the wooded valley and down onto the fallen towers, still lying where the storm threw them, their steel bent and twisted. A hiking trail leads from the top down into the valley, where you can walk among the wreckage and grasp the sheer scale of the ironwork up close, a steep descent that means a hard climb back out.

Kinzua Bridge sits in the Pennsylvania Wilds, a vast and thinly settled region of north-central Pennsylvania covered in forest and studded with state parks, the Allegheny National Forest, and some of the darkest night skies in the eastern United States. It is elk country, timber country, and a landscape that recovered from heavy nineteenth-century logging into deep second-growth forest.

This land was long the homeland of the Seneca of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and, earlier, other Native peoples who lived and hunted across these northern forests before displacement in the colonial and early national eras. None are federally recognized in Pennsylvania today, and descendant nations continue elsewhere. The wild forested valley the viaduct once crossed is a piece of that older northern woodland.

Spring and summer bring green to the deep valley and comfortable weather for the skywalk and the trail down to the wreckage. Summer is the busiest season, when families and rail enthusiasts come for the view, though the park rarely feels crowded in such open country.

Autumn is the showstopper, when the hardwood forest that fills the valley turns brilliant gold and crimson beneath the skywalk, drawing photographers from across the region. Winter is cold, quiet, and stark, the twisted steel dark against snow, and the high skywalk can be bitterly windy, so dress warmly and check conditions before a cold-season visit.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.