Devil's Elbow Bridge & Big Piney River Overlook

The Devil's Elbow Bridge is a 1923 steel through-truss span built by the Missouri State Highway Department three years before U.S. Route 66 was commissioned. The structure is a riveted Parker through-truss design — a common Depression-era highway-bridge configuration in which the roadway passes through the bridge's main truss panels rather than over them, with the trusses rising on both sides of the deck and arching over the traffic lanes. The bridge has typically been described as approximately 600 feet in total length across multiple spans, with a single main truss span of roughly 240 feet over the river's main channel and shorter approach spans on the abutments.

The bridge has been continuously open to vehicle traffic since 1923 — over a century at this point, and one of the longest continuously-operating highway bridges of its type anywhere in the central United States. The structure has been rehabilitated several times by the Missouri Department of Transportation, with significant deck and structural work in the 1990s and again in the 2010s, but the original 1923 truss members are largely intact. The bridge is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is formally recognized as a contributing structure to the Route 66 historic corridor.

Driving across the bridge today is genuinely part of the experience. The deck is one lane in each direction with no shoulder, the steel trusses pass close overhead on both sides, and the planking-style approach to the deck produces a distinctive low rumble through your tires that immediately tells you you're on something old and structural rather than modern concrete. Speed limits across the bridge are posted at 25 mph and traffic is light enough that visitors routinely stop at the far end, walk back across on the pedestrian shoulder, and photograph the bridge from the middle of the span looking down at the Big Piney.

The Big Piney River is one of the great Ozark float streams — a spring-fed, clear-running river that drains roughly 600 square miles of Pulaski, Texas, and Phelps County forest before joining the Gasconade River about 20 miles north of Devil's Elbow. The river is named for the pine timber that originally lined its banks (much of it cut and floated downstream in the late 1800s to feed the railroad-tie mills that supplied the expanding American railroad network), and it remains one of the most scenic small rivers in the Missouri Ozarks. The water is typically clear enough to see the gravel bottom at four or five feet of depth, and the surrounding bluffs rise 100 to 200 feet above the water on both banks.

The "elbow" itself is the dramatic 90-degree bend in the river immediately downstream of the bridge. The river approaches the bend from the southeast, hits the limestone bluff that anchors the north bank, and turns sharply almost back on itself before continuing northwest. From the bridge deck, you can see the bend on both sides — the long straight reach approaching from upstream and the equally long straight reach departing downstream, with the elbow itself forming the dramatic central feature. The geological cause is a resistant limestone formation that the river was unable to cut through and had to flow around; over geological time the bend has slowly migrated downstream but the basic configuration has been stable for thousands of years.

The river is a popular summer-season float stream. Several outfitters in nearby Waynesville and along the Big Piney corridor rent canoes, kayaks, and rafts for float trips of varying lengths, and the stretch passing under the Devil's Elbow Bridge is one of the most photogenic portions of the river. Float-trippers typically put in at one of the upstream access points and take out at Ross Access or one of the Mark Twain National Forest river accesses downstream. Summer weekends (June through August) are typically the peak float season; spring and fall floats are quieter and the surrounding foliage is often more dramatic.

Continuing east on old Route 66 (Teardrop Road) past the bridge, the highway climbs out of the Big Piney river bottom up a steep, winding grade onto the bluff above the river. About a mile up the grade, a small designated state scenic overlook provides one of the genuinely outstanding Ozark views on all of Missouri Route 66. The overlook is a simple pullout with a low rock wall, a small interpretive sign, and a panoramic view back down into the river valley with the 1923 bridge, the elbow itself, and the surrounding wooded bluffs all visible from above.

The overlook is signed but easy to drive past — the pullout is small and unmarked from the eastbound direction. The best approach is to cross the bridge eastbound, drive carefully up the grade for about a mile watching the right shoulder, and pull into the gravel turnout when you see the low rock wall. Parking accommodates about four cars; weekend Route 66 traffic occasionally fills the small turnout but waits of more than a few minutes are unusual. The view is best in the morning (sun on the bridge from the east) and in the fall when the surrounding oak and hickory forest turns red and yellow.

From the overlook, the original 1926 Route 66 alignment continues east toward Hooker, Big Piney, and eventually Waynesville. The route is sometimes called the "old" Route 66 alignment to distinguish it from the 1943 Hooker Cut bypass that carries modern Missouri Highway Z (and the 1980s-era I-44 alignment further north). For Route 66 purists, driving the old alignment across the Devil's Elbow Bridge and up to the overlook is one of the essential Missouri Mother Road experiences — the kind of stretch where the highway as it existed in the 1930s and 1940s survives essentially intact and the original landscape context is fully legible.

Devil's Elbow survives as a Route 66 time capsule because the highway moved away in 1943 and never came back. The Hooker Cut, completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1943, was a wartime infrastructure project intended to straighten and widen U.S. Route 66 through Pulaski County to better serve the massive military traffic flowing to and from Fort Leonard Wood. The original 1926 alignment through Devil's Elbow — narrow, winding, with the single-lane 1923 bridge and the steep grades up to the bluff overlook — was a bottleneck for the convoys of trucks, jeeps, and military equipment that needed to move through the corridor.

The Hooker Cut bypassed Devil's Elbow about 2 miles to the north and was, at the time of construction, the deepest highway cut in the United States — a dramatic limestone trench through the bluff that allowed Route 66 to maintain a gentler grade and a four-lane configuration. After completion, federal Route 66 was rerouted onto the Hooker Cut alignment and the original 1923-bridge alignment was reclassified as a state and county road. Traffic moved away from Devil's Elbow almost overnight and never returned in meaningful volume.

The economic consequences for Devil's Elbow were significant — the small commercial cluster that had served Route 66 travelers gradually dwindled across the 1940s and 1950s as the through-traffic dried up. But the preservation consequences were exactly the opposite: with no commercial pressure to modernize, widen, or redevelop, the original 1923 bridge, the original pavement, the Elbow Inn, and the riverbank landscape all survived essentially unchanged into the present day. Devil's Elbow today looks remarkably similar to how it looked in the late 1930s, and that combination of intact infrastructure and intact landscape is the reason Route 66 enthusiasts make the deliberate effort to detour off I-44 to drive the old alignment.

Visiting Devil's Elbow is genuinely simple — exit I-44 at the Hooker Cut exit (Exit 161 or one of the Waynesville exits), follow signed Teardrop Road south, and you'll reach the bridge in about 5 to 10 minutes. The bridge, the Elbow Inn (about 100 yards south of the bridge on Teardrop Road), and the scenic overlook (about a mile east of the bridge) are all within an easy quarter-mile walking radius if you park at the Elbow Inn lot. There is no formal Devil's Elbow visitor center, no entry gate, no admission of any kind — the entire experience is a free, self-guided drive-and-walk stop on the original Route 66 alignment.

Plan 45 minutes to an hour for a typical photo-and-walk visit: park at the Elbow Inn, walk down to the bridge (5 minutes), walk across the bridge and back (10-15 minutes including photography on the span), drive up to the scenic overlook (5 minutes plus 10 minutes at the pullout), and you've experienced essentially everything Devil's Elbow has to offer as a scenic stop. Add a meal at the Elbow Inn (45-90 minutes) and the total becomes a comfortable 2-hour Route 66 experience. The visit pairs naturally with stops at Waynesville (Frog Rock, the courthouse square, 5 miles east) and the broader Pulaski County Route 66 corridor.

Best photography times follow the standard rules — morning light (the sun hits the bridge from the east) and late afternoon golden hour (the sun lights the bluffs and the western bridge approach). Overcast days produce flatter but more even lighting that works well for documenting the bridge's structural details. Spring (April-May, when the redbuds and dogwoods bloom along the riverbanks) and fall (mid-October through early November, when the oak-hickory forest turns) are generally regarded as the most visually rewarding seasons. Summer is hot and the river is at its busiest with float-trippers; winter is quiet but the bare trees actually reveal the bridge's structure more clearly.