Excitement is building as the $6.4 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge connecting Ontario and Michigan rapidly approaches its greatest milestone to date.

The enormous border crossing is just weeks from reaching its hotly-anticipated climax: the milestone where the two sides of the bridge connect over the Detroit River and officially dethrone the Port Mann Bridge in British Columbia as the new longest cable-stayed bridge in North America.

As that moment nears, the team working on this new border crossing has been sharing an increasingly exciting series of project updates.

Just last week, photos captured from the Canadian side of the bridge's construction site dazzled viewers, and the latest batch of photos captured from the U.S. side are perhaps the most breathtaking shots of the mammoth new bridge captured to date.

Mind-bending aerial views show off the immense structure as it draws closer to the big moment where the two sides unite to form the bridge's unified structure.

The project's lead designer and construction engineer, Ankur Singh, explained back in March how the road deck and bridge connection will go down in the coming weeks or months.

Singh explained that "there is a custom piece, we call it a mid-span closure piece, which is specifically designed, approximately 11 metres long," that will connect the two ends of the bridge together and turn the two independent structures into a unified bridge.

Getting to that big milestone has been no easy task, involving the forming of 220-metre-tall support towers and the ongoing installation of 216 stay cables to support the six lanes of road deck below.

The bridge's extreme price tag — even before the added delays and cost overruns — is justifiable to the U.S. and Canadian governments through its closing of a key gap in the notoriously congested international trucking route.

The Gordie Howe Bridge is just one component in the massive push to close the missing link between Ontario's Highway 401 and I-75 in Michigan.

One of the new drone-captured views of the bridge's U.S. side includes the existing Ambassador Bridge in the background, showing the distance trucks must currently detour to navigate the gap between the two highways.

Even after the two sides of the bridge come together this summer, there will be plenty more work left to accomplish before the new crossing is ready to accommodate international traffic.

The newly installed stay cables still require stressing, while utilities, add signage, traffic lanes, multi-use path barriers, and many more finishing touches are currently pending.

The new bridge is currently scheduled to open by September 2025, bumped back from a since-missed projected completion date in November 2024.