STONY POINT – A pedestrian trail bridge at one of New York’s most visited state parks is being replaced thanks to a partnership between the Open Space Institute, cadets from the United States Military Academy at West Point, the State Office of Parks, Recreation, and Historic Preservation, and the Palisades Interstate Park Commission.
The trail bridge replacement at Harriman marks the fifth such effort to provide real world experience to engineering students, while expanding hiking and recreational opportunities for the public.
The partnership allows the cadets to take the skills and knowledge they are learning as part of their civil engineering education and apply it in the design and construction of a replacement trail bridge.
This year’s class of civil engineering cadets is designing and constructing a bridge along the Beech Trail of Harriman State Park as part of their senior-year capstone project.
As part of the coursework, the engineering students designed a replacement bridge for the Beech Trail and cadets custom-built prefabricated structural components of the bridge at West Point and then transported the materials to Harriman State Park for assembly and installation.
The Harriman project follows the replacement of four bridges along at Fahnestock State Park’s School Mountain Road section the Hubbard Perkins Loop Trail over the course of four years from 2018 to 2021.
