Edgemont City Park Covered Bridge
Fall River County, Edgemont. Built 2011, 120 ft. long. South Dakota's only covered bridge and the longest in the northern Great Plains, built of Douglas fir to reconnect a historic city park island.
Edgemont City Park Covered Bridge is South Dakota's only covered bridge and, by extension, the only one anywhere in the northern Great Plains. Built in 2011 of Douglas fir, designed by Kris Barker and built by Moses Borntreger, the 120-foot, 9-foot-wide span was made possible by Edgemont citizens determined to rebuild a proper crossing to the island in their century-old city park, a pond formed when the railroad dammed off a section of Cottonwood Creek running through town.
The park itself has a deeper backstory: Theodore Roosevelt visited in 1903, an event still marked with a display in the park today, and the covered bridge now serves as the start or end point of the Mickelson Trail, a major recreational trail across the Black Hills. Located about 24 miles west of Hot Springs off Highway 18, the bridge stands 8 feet high and gives Edgemont, a small railroad town, a genuinely singular landmark: the longest covered bridge in South Dakota, and the only one in a region of the country that otherwise has none at all.