White River Bridge closure: Buckley, Enumclaw go extra mile to connect

BUCKLEY, Pierce County — The bridge over the White River was bustling with traffic. Commuters hurrying to work. Parents and children trying to beat the first bell. Retired folks in less than a hurry. Below them, the river ran milky with fine glacial flour, as it always does this time of year.

It was just another typical day in the rural shadow of Mount Rainier nearly 50 miles southeast of Seattle. Except it wasn’t.

It’s not normal for me to walk,” said Jamie Petersen, 46, who lives in Buckley, on the south side of the river, and visits her mother a few times a week in Enumclaw, to the north.

This day, she was strolling across the bridge pulling a roller bag, with a backpack and tote stacked on top of it. A small Amazon package was tucked under her arm.

“I’m just thankful that there’s still a way across,” she said.

Just to the west sat the bridge Petersen and everyone else normally uses — the damaged Highway 410 bridge, closed since Aug. 18, when a tall truckload whacked its crossbeams, warping them and making the structure unsafe to cross. State transportation officials estimate repairs could reach $6 million, and will keep the two-lane bridge closed to traffic until sometime in November.

In the meantime, the people of Buckley, with a population of 5,300, and Enumclaw, which has about 12,700 residents, have been relying on a pedestrian and bicycle bridge that was built less than a year ago as part of the Foothills Trail, a 22-mile paved trail that connects Puyallup to Enumclaw.

People walked, or rode a bike or scooter over the bridge. Strollers were pushed, as were some motorcycles. A young man toted a golf bag loaded with clubs, and a young woman walked with a bouquet of flowers. A deputy with the King County sheriff’s office patrolled, on foot, back and forth.

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” said Petersen. “There’s a lot of creative stuff happening.”

For Petersen and her neighbors, the trail bridge is a surprising and welcome lifeline, the most direct way between these closely knit communities. Rather than driving the long way around through Auburn or by Lake Tapps, which can take an hour or more, their walking commute is a half-hour or less — still an inconvenience compared with the five or so minutes the trip took before the Highway 410 bridge closed.

Petersen wasn’t alone in her creative necessity. People have bought electric bikes and scooters, or connected with co-workers to devise some carpooling scheme to ease the commute pain. Employers are offering shuttles, and both King County Metro and Pierce Transit have shifted service to help people get to and from the bridge. Businesses are cooperating with one another to help stem the loss in sales.

The closed bridge — which carried about 22,000 vehicles a day, according to the Washington State Department of Transportation — highlights how crucial such spans can be in rural communities with scarce services. Buckley, for instance, has no hospital or supermarket. A few miles north, across the bridge in Enumclaw, sits St. Elizabeth Hospital, as well as a Safeway, QFC and Grocery Outlet.

Bella McLaws, who works with the nonprofit Enumclaw Plateau Community Association, said the closed bridge has shown not only how tied the communities on either side of the river are but also their vulnerability.

“We’re really two independent communities, but this closure has proved our dependency on each other,” she said. “But we feel like we’re on an island. What if there’s a wildfire? Or a mudflow, a lahar (from Mount Rainier)? This is a real concern for our community, that we’re going to be isolated. We definitely need better bridges, safer bridges, more reliable bridges.”

The best dead end

Highway 410 cuts through Buckley on its way north. At the last traffic signal before the damaged bridge, not a half-mile away, a business marquee reads, “Hey WSDOT free ice cream if you can fix this before October.”

The other side says, “This is the best dead end in PNW!”

The sign belongs to Mount Rainier Creamery & Market, which opened less than a year ago with the idea to create “the shortest distance between you and your food,” according to its website.

The bridge debacle has changed things, said Ryan Mensonides, who owns the Buckley creamery and associated dairy farm with his wife, Haylee. Their farm, which supplies the renovated gas station with all its organic milk, is just a few miles away in Enumclaw.

The five-minute drive between farm and store, which Mensonides does a few times a day, now takes upward of 90 minutes, one way.

But the real pain is the loss in sales, he said.

“We had our best month ever in July. We crushed expectations,” he said of the creamery, which also sells ice cream, coffee, produce and fresh eggs. “The first week (after the bridge closed), sales were down about 35%. Last week, we were down about 50%. It’s pretty bleak. It’s going to be a really rough six weeks.”

Across the street, at Wally’s Drive-In, the situation’s the same, said Kimarie Johnson, operations manager for the restaurant and sister chowder house in Des Moines.

“Our sales are about half of what they normally are,” she said, noting that they had 29 employees before the bridge shut down but now have 24. “And we’re still going to go down quite a bit. We’re going to have to cut hours even more.”

Johnson said the roadblocks right outside the drive-in fully stop people from going any farther. But even before drivers get there, another sign tells them the road is closed.

“Most people turn around there,” she said.

Off the main highway drag, where the old town’s Main Street runs, businesses have seen a change as traffic that once passed through and, perhaps, stopped for a bite to eat is now gone.

“We’re now a dead end,” said Tori Schneider, who owns Buckley’s Doxsa Social House and the adjoining CrossFit gym with her husband, Kevin.

“It’s definitely slowed down,” she said. “On the flip side, a lot of people are asking what they can do to help.”

Schneider’s found some interesting ways to keep the bills paid. She’s collaborating with The Claw CrossFit in Enumclaw, and each gym is honoring the other’s memberships, allowing people to work out in whichever one is more convenient until the bridge reopens.

And Buckle & Boot Buckley is using the Doxsa restaurant space on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings for country line dance lessons.

“Buckley and Enumclaw tend to survive,” Schneider said.

Bridge to somewhere

Like many American places, the Enumclaw plateau is still bound to the automobile, and the bridge closure has put this fact in high relief.

Parked cars pile up on either side of the bridge — packed in every available space along Mud Mountain Road on the north side, more orderly in the vast parking lots near the Buckley Log Show Grounds and National Guard Armory to the south.

Many walking across — less than a mile, car to car, only a brief section over water — said they’ve found the good in the situation. People are getting out and meeting each other. The communities are leaning on each other, and binding closer together.

Still, they want their bridge back, even if it was an imperfect span that regularly backed up in the afternoons, traffic sometimes stretching a mile in either direction.

Mensonides, at the creamery, suggested the bridge should be wider, and said he met with Gov. Bob Ferguson when he visited, and pressed him to put a better warning system on the crossing for approaching vehicles that are too tall.

Considering the state’s finances and the backlog of bridge repair, the White River Bridge — which was built in 1949 and received a “fair” structural rating in its routine inspection in April 2025 — might have to settle for simple repair and reopening.

Across the state, WSDOT maintains 3,412 bridges. As of June 2024, 29 of those were in need of complete replacement, and 33 more need structural rehabilitation. Another 223 bridges will need to be replaced or rehabilitated over the next decade.

Currently, 133 state bridges are load-restricted, meaning they’re limited to lightweight and emergency vehicles.

The need is great, but state funding not so much.

For more than a decade, state lawmakers have budgeted only about half the estimated $1 billion needed every year to keep the state’s highways and many bridges in good condition.

The transportation budget approved this year raised the gas tax by 6 cents, but much of the revenue it will bring in will go to finish work on highway expansions promised years ago, on the mostly completed Highway 520 replacement, the North Spokane Corridor and extensions of highways 509 and 167 in SeaTac, Fife and the Port of Tacoma.

But maybe state officials will find a creative solution to its bridge woes, like the people of Buckley and Enumclaw. Like Nicola Church.

She and her family live in Buckley, but her 8-year-old son, James, plays baseball in Enumclaw.

On Tuesday, she and James had just driven the long way around. She dropped him at practice and parked the car on the north side of the bridge, where she left it to walk home.

Later, her husband will walk back, get the car, pick up James and drive the long way home, saving both parents from having to do the whole drive, but not young James.

“He went from having a two-hour practice to a four-hour adventure,” she said. “We’re getting creative.