There was birthday cake and bagpiping but no bungy-jumping as more than 40 people gathered for a picnic lunch to mark the the Horseshoe Bend suspension bridge's anniversary.
Piper Ken Bain, of Roxburgh, performed some songs on the bridge and was asked to play more later.
''Either that or you could bungy off it,'' quipped Teviot Valley Community Board chairman Raymond Gunn.
''No thanks,'' was the quick response. The bridge over the Clutha River was built in 1913 and is one of the few reminders that Horseshoe Bend was once a busy gold mining community, with a population of several hundred.
''It's part of our engineering heritage and it's one of my favourite spots,'' Teviot Valley Walkways Committee chairwoman Sheena Boag, of Millers Flat, said. The committee organised yesterday's function.
''Horseshoe Bend was a rugged and isolated part of Central Otago and the bridge wasn't visible from the road on either side of the river,'' she said.
The 70.2m-long bridge, with 9.3m-high towers, has national recognition as a ''significant heritage engineering structure'' and was designed by Tuapeka County engineer, John Edie, who later entered politics.
It was restored and reopened in 2003 as a joint project between the Department of Conservation and the walkways committee. The bridge is near the Clutha Gold cycle trail or it can be accessed by a 10-minute walk from the Beaumont Millennium Track car park.
Helen Pinder, of Roxburgh, said residents had lobbied the county council for many years to get the bridge. The only means of transport across the river at that point was by boat or by a chair suspended from a wire cable 75m above the water and attached to a rope, which allowed the passengers to pull themselves across the river.
She read out articles from the Tuapeka Times 104 years ago, which mentioned children travelling across the river that way to get to and from school.
''Sometimes the chair would stop mid-stream when the rope jammed for quarter of an hour or more, with a child on it.''
It proved so risky that children were banned from attending school for a while, she said. Lofty Kain, of Waihola, recalled regularly taking mobs of 5000 sheep across the narrow suspension bridge in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he was working at Beaumont Station.
''The five horses and sheep would go over it no problem but the dogs were pretty frightened and they'd often swim across the river instead.
''I remember if you were waiting on the side, you had a wait a long time before all the sheep were over.''
The bridge is managed by the Central Otago District Council.
