"The squirrels have informed me that they really like this design because it's nice and open." Norma Davey, one of the longtime organizers behind Longview's squirrel bridge network, said that about the Nutty Narrows Bridge years ago, and anyone who has walked past the tiny wooden span near the Civic Center understands exactly what she meant. It looks like a miniature suspension bridge stretched sixty feet between two trees, built for an audience of one species, and it has been carrying that audience across a busy street since 1963.
This past July, the ten-foot wooden squirrel statue that stood near that same stretch of ground came down. The Sandbaggers, the volunteer group that has looked after Longview's squirrel bridges for six decades, removed it themselves, and City Hall heard about it afterward.
That detail is the whole story. Longview's most famous landmark isn't run by the city at all.
Who Actually Keeps the Bridges Running
The Nutty Narrows Bridge was the idea of a local developer named Amos Peters, who built it out of aluminum and a length of fire hose to give squirrels a safer way across the road. It's believed to be the world's first squirrel bridge, and it worked well enough that squirrels reportedly began teaching their young to use it. Since then, nine more bridges have gone up around the Civic Center, most of them strung along tree routes near Lake Sacajawea, and none of them were built by a city crew.
A volunteer group called the Sandbaggers has maintained the entire network from the start. When Peters died in 1984, the Sandbaggers commissioned a carved wooden squirrel statue in his memory and dedicated it on July 3, 1985, during Go 4th, Longview's annual Fourth of July celebration. That statue has stood near the library and the Civic Circle ever since, close enough to the bridges that most residents probably think of it as a single landmark rather than two separate projects built decades apart.
The Rotary Club of Longview stepped in to organize the public festival version of all this, Squirrel Fest, starting in 2019. That's an important distinction. Rotary runs the party. The Sandbaggers still run the bridges.
The Statue Disappears, Nobody Calls City Hall
In July 2026, the Sandbaggers removed the aging squirrel statue themselves and launched a GoFundMe to pay for a replacement, citing termite damage to the original wood. City officials told the Spokesman-Review they hadn't been notified in advance and didn't know the statue was gone until after the fact. The campaign was organized by Spencer Boudreau, who chairs special events for the club and served as Longview's mayor until the end of last year.
No public hearing. No permit application. No line item in a city budget meeting. A community group decided a piece of public-facing infrastructure needed work, took it, and asked residents to fund the fix directly.
That's not a loophole. It's how this particular landmark has always worked. The bridges were never a city capital project to begin with. They were a private citizen's fix for a problem he noticed, adopted informally by a club that kept building on it, decade after decade, without ever needing the city to formally take ownership. The statue belonged to the club that commissioned it, so the club decided when it needed repair.
What the City Actually Owns Here
Worth being precise about the boundaries, since they explain why this story played out the way it did:
- The land under the bridges and the statue, including Lake Sacajawea Park and the Civic Center grounds, belongs to the City of Longview.
- The bridges themselves and the statue that stood near them have always been built, funded, and maintained by the Sandbaggers, a volunteer club with no formal city authority.
- Squirrel Fest, the public festival built around this landmark, has been organized by the Rotary Club of Longview since 2019, separate from the club that actually built the bridges.
Three different parties, three different levels of formal authority, one landmark that most residents experience as a single thing. The statue removal only registered as unusual because it briefly made that division visible.
The Trail You Already Walk
Squirrel Fest itself changed shape this year too. The festival moved off its traditional home at the Civic Circle and relocated to the campus of Lower Columbia College for its fifteenth year on August 22, 2026, a shift organizers described as a way to add vendor space, parking, and room for the crowd, which has drawn upward of 3,500 people in recent years. The bridges themselves didn't move. They're still exactly where they've always been, strung through the trees near the lake and the Civic Center, doing the same quiet job they've done since 1963 whether or not the festival is happening a mile away.
That's worth remembering the next time you're out on Lake Sacajawea's trail system, which runs 3.5 miles past the lake's rhododendron gardens, its two fountains, the Frank Willis Arboretum, and the Japanese Gardens. The Harvest Classic 5K and 10K walk and run is set for October 3, 2026, starting near 906 New York Street, tracing paths that pass close enough to the bridge network that runners go right underneath more than one of them without necessarily noticing. Most people don't. The bridges are built to be missed by anyone taller than a squirrel.
Whether the statue gets replaced before the weather turns colder is still an open question as of this writing, and whatever goes back up will almost certainly go through the same process the original did in 1985: a volunteer club decides it's time, raises the money itself, and puts something back near the library without waiting on a council vote. That's not a gap in how Longview manages its public spaces. It's the arrangement working exactly as it was built to work sixty years ago, when a lumber town let one resident's odd idea for squirrel safety turn into something the whole city eventually claimed as its own.
If you're out walking Lake Sacajawea this fall and you spot a new squirrel statue before the rest of us do, Karen Higgins would love to hear about it. She's logged as many miles on that trail as she has showing homes near it, and either way, she's easy to find at the lake.
