Once A Bridge

After not really going out over the Labor Day weekend and it being rather rainy yesterday I got out today to another of the state parks here in Georgia to find the geocache there.  It was good to be out and about, for sure.  Panola Mountain State Park is primarily a conservation area with a lot of protected land and property but at the same time there are a lot of community things as well.  There is a two lane concrete bike path that goes for 18 miles... one way.  There's also a rather large maintained field for flying remote-controlled planes and a few lakes around which some folks were fishing.  A very nice park for sure.  The cache was an easy walk along a golf cart path along an abandoned golf course that must have been abandoned some time ago.  I walked beyond the cache site and found an old bridge that was on the 'things to see' list and I'm glad I got there.  This kind of stuff really gets my mind whirling imagining what was once but is no more.

So this is the bridge I found.  So many 'things' about it that I'd love to know about.  Those things that might look like fallen leaves, aren't.  Yeah, there's some leaves but there are hundreds of man-made depressions in what looks like some crummy concrete and why those depressions are there is just one of those things that baffled me.

As said in the title of the post, this was 'once' a bridge, but no more.  If you blow up this photo by clicking on it you can those depressions pretty clearly.  The closest thing that I know that they look like are bear claw scratches... 3 perpendicular lines about 4-5 inches long... hundreds of them in random directions.

As I just kind of stood around taking a bit of a break I kept discovering things.  You can see that this was a very well made structure.  A very solid flat rock base, cast iron/steel support pieces, and then the concrete layer, perhaps added when it was built, perhaps added later.  Another thing I'd like to know.

I took this picture because I was just kind of dreaming, I guess.  Like, what the hell happened here?!?!?  That's 4-5 feet of dirt settled on top of what once was an active bridge and an active road.  Beyond it, very dense growth that has obviously been there for a while.  It became more intriguing when I went back.  I didn't follow the cart path back but followed a road in the opposite direction to the photos here.  The road was an untraveled dirt/gravel road at least two cars wide.  A ways up this road I noticed a road sign in the brush/trees and when I went over to get to where I could read it, it said One Lane Bridge Ahead.  So, this was an active road and an active bridge at one time.  Now it's not.  Now I'm wishing there was a way I could have gotten across this somewhat deep little river/creek to see what was on the other side.  There was no informational sign or the like to be found so this will bug me for a while, I'm sure :)