The Blue Bridge is a curved pedestrian and bicycle bridge. The bridge connects the north and south halves of the Reed College

Reed College

Reed College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in southeast Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus located in Portland's Eastmoreland neighborhood, featuring architecture based on the Tudor-Gothic style, and a forested canyon wilderness...

 campus in Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon

Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

, United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. It crosses the west end of Reed Lake, which is part of the course of Crystal Springs Creek, a tributary of Johnson Creek

Johnson Creek (Willamette River)

Johnson Creek is a 25-mile tributary of the Willamette River in the Portland metropolitan area of the U.S. state of Oregon. Part of the drainage basin of the Columbia River, its watershed consists of of mostly urban land occupied by about 175,000 people as of 2006...

.

It is made of concrete and crosses the Reed College Canyon, sloping downwards from south to north; because of the unusual shape of the bridge, it received the "Excellence in Concrete" award from the American Concrete and Aggregate Producers Association. The name refers to the blue lights which illuminate it at night. The lights were originally purchased in 1998 by Rain Lynham, that year's signator for the college's annual end of year party, known as Renn Fayre, and were intended to simply be temporary replacements for the normal white lights. However, they proved to be so popular that no one bothered to change them back. In 2004, students changed the blue lights to green for Renn Fayre. They were changed back to blue shortly thereafter.

Before the Blue Bridge was built in 1992, access to the Cross Canyon dormitories was via the first cross-canyon bridge. The first cross canyon bridge was constructed in 1959. The unusual design of this bridge, the only one of its kind in the world, was the result of more than a year’s research by the architect and a plywood company. The bridge was supported by two cantilevers of prestressed plywood and covered with a thin canvas membrane.

A land bridge

Land bridge

A land bridge, in biogeography, is an isthmus or wider land connection between otherwise separate areas, over which animals and plants are able to cross and colonise new lands...

impounds Reed Lake several hundred feet to the west. An S-shaped bridge, constructed in 2008, traverses the lower Reed Canyon west of the land bridge.