Natural Bridge Park near Natural Bridge, Alabama, is park in Winston County, Alabama, that has been open since 1954. The current owners are Jim and Barbara Denton.
The park includes picnic accommodations, an artesian well which supplies drinking fountains, a gift shop featuring hand-crafted items, 27 varieties of fern, a variety of hemlock which dates back to the Ice Age and a 30 minute nature trail.
The Natural Bridge formation is 60 ft (18.3 m) high, 148 feet (45 m) long, and composed of sandstone and iron ore. This bridge is the longest natural bridge east of the Rocky Mountains in North America.
Downhill from the natural bridge is an outcropping of rock, presenting the image of a large American Indian head, in the right profile view, similar to that of an old American Indian Head nickel (see photo). The stone image is just over 15 feet (4.6 m) high.
As of 2002, tourists paid $2.50 to enter the park. Because of insurance concerns, visitors are not allowed to walk over the bridge, but instead, they view it while walking underneath.
NOTE: Cost to enter park is still $2.50 as of October 2012. According to park brochure, park is open "from 8:00am until around sunset seven days a week."
Famous quotes containing the words natural, bridge and/or park:
“And if anyone should think I am tracing this matter too curiously, I, who have considered it in various shapes, can only answer with Hamlet ... “Not a jot”; it being no more than the natural result of examining and considering the subject.”
—Sarah Fielding (1710–1768)
“What need the bridge much broader than the flood?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Borrow a child and get on welfare.
Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child,
or go to the public park with the child, and take the child
to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and
be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don’t talk
back ...”
—Susan Griffin (b. 1943)