Nutty Narrows Bridge
A puckish civic group has restored a 60-foot long bridge for squirrels to its rightful and historic place of prominence in Longview, WA. The Longview Sandbaggers, who wear matching red and white seersucker jackets, pushed to have the squirrel bridge, known as Nutty Narrows, moved to a place where more people can see and admire it.
Sandbaggers Worked to Restore the Glory of the Nutty Narrows
Squirrel-lover, builder and former Sandbagger president Amos Peters built The Nutty Narrows Bridge in 1963 to keep squirrels getting squashed by cars on the way to a building where people fed them. So, while not exactly a critical wildlife corridor, but it’s certainly a feat of amusing engineering.
And squirrels really use it. And teach their young to cross.
The original bridge cost $1,000 and was made of pipe and fire house. The bridge is the centerpiece of town and gets decorated for holidays. It’s been updated and moved a couple times, most recently when one of the trees it was attached to died. When Peters died, the town put up a giant chainsaw squirrel sculpture. Men usually carve tree trunks into lifesize bears, but this statue is so much more adorable and interesting because it’s a 10x lifesize squirrel.
The city, which is just over the river from Oregon, says it was moving it because the bridge was a distraction to drivers. Stuff and nonsense. Back when the city moved the bridge in 2005 the Sandbaggers complained that you’d practically need a telescope to see it.
Thank you, Sandbaggers, for making Longview safe for squirrels and delightful for animal tourists.
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[…] we’ve covered earlier, Longview whimsically set up an elaborate squirrel bridge in 1963. Some dismal practicalities forced the town to move the bridge to an out of the way rodent […]