2026-07-072026-07-07http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/68419J. Hempel's definition of the distance of a Heegaard surface generalizes to a complexity for a knot which is in bridge position with respect to a Heegaard surface. Our main result is that the distance of a knot in bridge position is bounded above by twice the genus, plus the number of boundary components, of an essential surface in the knot complement. As a consequence knots constructed via sufficiently high powers of pseudo-Anosov maps have minimal bridge presentations which are thin.14 pages, 4 figuresGeometric Topology57M25text