Mike's Hyalite Farmers Canal Bridge
Gallatin County, near Bozeman. Built 1980, 39 ft. long. A small private King post covered bridge on a ranch driveway south of the city.
Mike's Hyalite Farmers Canal Bridge is a small, privately built covered bridge crossing the Hyalite Farmers Canal on a rural property south of Bozeman in Gallatin County. Built in 1980 on a King post truss and stretching just 39 feet, the bridge sits at the end of an unmarked driveway off Black Bear Road, built simply by a property owner remembered locally only as "Mike" — a modest, personal project rather than a publicly commissioned crossing.
Unlike Montana's lost 19th-century covered bridges in the Bitterroot Valley, all of which were swept away by flooding over the decades, Mike's bridge has quietly endured on private land, largely unknown outside of dedicated covered bridge enthusiasts and the handful of regional bridge-hunters who have documented it. It represents a different, more personal strand of the covered bridge tradition: not a county-funded public works project or a memorial, but simply one landowner's choice to build something a little more distinctive than an ordinary crossing.