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Fremont

Posted Aug 19, 2026

The Bridge That Never Stops Opening

Shot from the water at sunset, waiting under the Aurora Bridge for the most frequently opened drawbridge in the country.

Looking west along the ship canal from a sailboat at sunset, the steel arch of the Aurora Bridge overhead, the Fremont Bridge raised with both leaves up and the sun setting through the gap, rigging and a furled sail in the right foreground

The Fremont Bridge has thirty feet of clearance, which is not enough for almost anything with a mast. It opens about thirty-five times a day and has done since 1917, which makes it the most frequently opened drawbridge in the United States. If you sail on Lake Union you do not admire this bridge. You wait for it.

That is what this frame is: the wait. Both leaves are up, the sun is going down straight through the gap, and everyone on the water is holding position until the arms come back down. The rigging and the sail cover on the right are the boat I was standing on. I did not choose this composition so much as end up inside it.

The big steel arch overhead is a different bridge entirely. That is the Aurora Bridge, carrying Highway 99 across the canal a hundred and sixty feet up, built in 1932 precisely so the traffic that mattered would never have to stop for a boat again. Two bridges, fifteen years and one enormous change in priorities apart, in the same photograph.

The technical footnote is that this came off a Lumia 929, which is a phone from 2014. Five thousand pixels wide, stitched in the phone, hand held from the deck of a moving boat. The gear question gets less interesting every year.