[1] It was fabricated in 1971 by Kawasaki Heavy Industries in Japan, built by Willamette Western Contractors, and opened in 1973.

The four-lane bridge spans the North Fork of the American River in Placer County between the city of Auburn and the town of Foresthill in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

A seismic retrofit project began in January 2011 and was completed in 2015, with an estimated cost of $74.4 million.

The bridge can be seen in the beginning of the 2002 film XXX [5] in which Vin Diesel's character Xander Cage is seen driving a stolen red Chevrolet Corvette off it, then jumping from the car mid-flight and parachuting to his accomplices at the bottom of the American River Canyon.

It also appears in a montage sequence toward the end of the romantic comedy The Ugly Truth,[6] and has been utilized in multiple exercise equipment advertisements.