Pip: There is a Bigfoot trap in southern Oregon, and somehow that is the least surprising part of how someone ends up visiting all 54 of the state’s covered bridges.
Mara: Laurie Ross has been doing exactly that — chasing quirky Oregon attractions and documenting the routes so you don’t have to make all the same U-turns. Today we’re looking at what that bridge quest actually involved.
Pip: Let’s start with the bridges themselves, and the road trip that found them.
Oregon’s 54 Covered Bridges
Mara: The premise here is simple: most people don’t know Oregon even has covered bridges, let alone 54 of them. This post is the itinerary that didn’t exist when the research started.
Pip: And the whole thing began not with a bridge, but with a detour. The post is direct about the origin: “one weekend, we headed to the Bigfoot trap outside of Jacksonville and decided to see what else was on the route; one of those things was the Lost Creek Covered Bridge, just off Highway 140 on the way to Medford.”
Mara: So a roadside oddity unlocked a months-long project. That’s the real upshot — one unplanned stop became a checklist, a selfie stick, and a mission to find every covered bridge in the state.
Pip: Which sounds leisurely until you read about the logistics. No single reliable source existed. Names on historical records didn’t match Google Maps, the GPS had its own opinions, and plenty of weekends ended with U-turns on unpaved forest service roads.
Mara: The post is honest that even the bridge count was hard to confirm. They leaned on a map from The Oregonian as a starting point, but it didn’t help with routing or accessibility. What’s being offered here is the practical layer that was missing — a six-day itinerary built from the experience of doing it the hard way first.
Pip: And the bridges themselves reward the effort. They’re not interchangeable. Some sit quietly beside creeks, some anchor the middle of a town, and some have been through a century of Oregon weather and show every year of it.
Mara: The standout for the author is the Chambers Railroad Covered Bridge — a bridge built specifically for trains, which is a genuinely unusual thing to encounter. The post frames it as the one that best captures what the whole quest became: each bridge has its own story, and finding the stories turned out to matter as much as finding the bridges.
Pip: Fifty-four stops, one itinerary, and it all started because someone wanted to see a Bigfoot trap.
Mara: The through-line here is that the best itineraries come from people who got lost making them first.
Pip: Next time — more Oregon, more quirk, more roads that probably don’t have great cell service.
Note: This podcast was developed using AI. I tried it just for fun 🙂
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