40 Fun Facts About Mackinac Bridge

Which nickname do Upper Peninsula residents give Lower Peninsula folk, a joke about living below the Mackinac Bridge?

Trolls is the name, because Lower Peninsula residents live "under the bridge"; those north of it answer to Yoopers, from "UP-ers".

In 1959 an Air Force captain was grounded for life after doing what at the Mackinac Bridge in a B-47 bomber?

Flying beneath it earned Captain John Lappo a general court-martial: he took his Boeing Stratojet under a deck with only 155 feet of clearance at mid-span.

Counting its approaches, roughly how far does a traveler go from one end of the Mackinac Bridge to the other?

About 5 miles is the full crossing, 26,372 feet in all, though the main span between the two towers covers only 3,800 feet of it.

What will Mackinac Bridge Authority staff do, for a small fee, for motorists too nervous to make the crossing?

Drive their car across is the offer, around the clock, and more than a thousand people a year hand over the keys.

On which holiday each year may walkers cross the Mackinac Bridge on foot, traditionally led by Michigan's governor?

Labor Day has hosted the walk since 1959, yet only 68 people joined the very first one, held at the bridge's dedication in June 1958.

In severe winds, how far sideways can the deck at the center of the Mackinac Bridge move by design?

35 feet is the limit, east or west, and the deck slides there slowly instead of swaying; the weight of passing vehicles eases it back once the wind drops.

A stubborn legend says the concrete piers of the Mackinac Bridge hold what, a claim the bridge authority denies?

Bodies of workers are not entombed there: five men died building the bridge, and a plaque near its northern end carries their names.

Which pronunciation of Mackinac is correct for the Mackinac Bridge, whose name keeps a French spelling?

Mack-in-aw is right however the name is spelled: the French wrote the sound as "ac", while the British spelled what they heard.

Standing on the Mackinac Bridge, a walker has Lake Michigan on one side and which other Great Lake on the other?

Huron is joined to Lake Michigan so broadly at the straits that hydrologists study the pair as one body of water, Lake Michigan–Huron.

The Mackinac Bridge's towers are painted ivory, but which color covers its cables and structural steel?

Green is the color, and the bridge authority lists the exact federal paint codes for fans who want to match it on a house or a boat.

The Mackinac Bridge Authority never salts the bridge deck in winter, chiefly to prevent which problem?

Steel corrosion is the worry, so the deck goes unsalted and the authority warns motorists whenever the roadway turns slick.

Which Discovery Channel series sent host Mike Rowe to work alongside the Mackinac Bridge's maintenance crew in 2007?

Dirty Jobs filmed at the bridge that May, and Rowe joined the crew stripping and repainting the steel inside one of its towers.

With its causeway already built, which event stalled the Mackinac Bridge and saw its first authority abolished in 1947?

World War II halted the project with only a 4,200-foot causeway in place, and a new bridge authority was not created until 1950.

In 1884 a store ad captioned a drawing of which New York landmark as the proposed span across the Straits of Mackinac?

Brooklyn Bridge had been dedicated only a year earlier, and its success gave backers of a Straits crossing fresh encouragement.

Which U.S. president joined the Mackinac Bridge Walk in 1992, the year it drew its largest crowd?

George H. W. Bush crossed with an estimated 85,000 walkers that year, the biggest turnout the event has recorded.

Which Interstate, running from Florida to the Canadian border, is carried across the straits by the Mackinac Bridge?

I-75 took over the crossing in 1960; for its first three years the bridge carried US 27 instead.

The 1940 collapse of which span, nicknamed Galloping Gertie, shaped the wind-resistant design of the Mackinac Bridge?

Tacoma Narrows fell in a 40-mile-per-hour wind four months after opening, so the Michigan crossing was given deep stiffening trusses to steady its deck.

Before the Mackinac Bridge opened, thousands jammed the Straits ferry docks each November at the start of which season?

Deer hunting drew such long ferry queues that vendors worked the line selling hot pasties to the waiting hunters.

Which engineer designed the Mackinac Bridge after publishing a study of why suspension bridges become unstable in wind?

David B. Steinman and his firm designed more than 400 bridges on five continents, and he called the Michigan crossing his crowning achievement.

Which Upper Peninsula city, begun as a French Catholic mission in 1671, sits at the northern end of the Mackinac Bridge?

St. Ignace gained an eight-acre park for viewing the bridge in 2002, and it is one of two ports with ferries to Mackinac Island.

Which Florida road, like the Mackinac Bridge, is a tolled stretch of the Interstate the bridge carries?

Alligator Alley crosses the Everglades on the same Interstate, which also charges a toll on the American half of the International Bridge to Canada.

Which Michigan governor, nicknamed Soapy, was the first person to pay the toll on the newly opened Mackinac Bridge?

G. Mennen Williams paid $3.25 to cross, and his portrait in the Michigan State Capitol shows him seated in front of the bridge.

In 1920 Michigan's highway commissioner proposed which way to cross the Straits, decades before the Mackinac Bridge?

A floating tunnel was his idea; a rival plan would have hopped a chain of causeways and bridges across three islands from Cheboygan.

Which term names the fear of crossing bridges, common enough at the Mackinac Bridge that staff offer help?

Gephyrophobia joins the Greek words for bridge and fear, and it tends to be worse on tall spans because it overlaps with a fear of heights.

Which reconstructed French colonial outpost, founded around 1715, stands beside the southern end of the Mackinac Bridge?

Archaeologists began digging at Fort Michilimackinac in 1959, two years after the bridge opened, and the post was rebuilt from what they found.

Stripping the Mackinac Bridge to bare steel became a 20-year job from 1999 because the old paint held which hazard?

Lead in the old coats had to be removed and disposed of safely; the zinc-based replacement is expected to last 35 years.

The Mackinac Bridge was financed by selling investors nearly $100 million of which kind of security, repaid from tolls?

Revenue bonds worth $99.8 million found buyers only on the third attempt, and the last of them was retired on July 1, 1986.

At an 1888 board meeting of which Mackinac Island resort did Cornelius Vanderbilt II urge a bridge across the Straits?

Grand Hotel directors were holding their first meeting, and Vanderbilt argued that a bridge would lengthen the short resort season.

Laid end to end, the wire spun into the Mackinac Bridge's two main cables would stretch roughly how far?

42,000 miles of wire went into the cables: each one bundles 12,580 wires about a fifth of an inch thick into a cable two feet across.

Concrete, steel and cables together, roughly how much does the entire Mackinac Bridge weigh?

1 million tons is about right, 1,024,500 by its designer's count, and roughly nine-tenths of that is concrete.

Which deck feature, urged in its designer's study of wind stability, was built into the Mackinac Bridge?

An open-grid roadway, paired with deep stiffening trusses, raises the wind speed at which the deck could turn unstable.

When it opened in 1957, the Mackinac Bridge outranked every other suspension bridge by which measure?

Length between anchorages was its claim, at 8,614 feet, and it still holds that title for the Western Hemisphere.

Which steelmaker's American Bridge Division won the $44 million contract for the Mackinac Bridge's superstructure?

U.S. Steel rolled the plates, bars, wire and cables in its own mills before its bridge division assembled them over the straits.

Which former U.S. senator, the bridge authority's first chairman, is called the father of the Mackinac Bridge?

Prentiss M. Brown traced his zeal to a winter day when the ferries were stuck and he hiked four miles over the frozen straits, only to miss his train.

Michigan's governor rode which state ferry on its final Straits run, about an hour after the Mackinac Bridge opened?

Vacationland, a winter-hardy ferry that joined the state fleet in 1952, made the last run; in 34 years the fleet had carried about 12 million vehicles.

The Mackinac Bridge carries which national scenic footpath, a section hikers can cover on only one day each year?

North Country Trail hikers get their chance during the annual bridge walk, the only time people on foot are allowed on the span.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II proposed in 1888 a Straits of Mackinac bridge modeled on one rising over which Scottish estuary?

Firth of Forth engineers finished their great bridge in 1889, a year after Vanderbilt held it up as the model for Michigan.

The engineer who designed the Mackinac Bridge celebrated it in which kind of writing, a hobby he took up at 63?

Poetry became his second calling: his collection of bridge-themed verse appeared in 1955, and one of his poems salutes the Michigan crossing itself.

Each August the Mackinac Bridge Authority draws 25 nonprofits to win which rare experience, which they may raffle off?

A tower tour for two is the prize; the towers rise 552 feet above the water, and each winning group auctions or raffles its pass for charity.

What does every participant receive on finishing the annual Mackinac Bridge Walk, handed out at both ends of the span?

A numbered certificate awaits each finisher; the walk itself costs nothing, needs no registration and takes about two hours on average.