Hike Bridge Mountain via Pine Creek Canyon Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, NV

Dec 12, 2016 — Bridge Mountain is the gorgeous lightly-colored dome seen from below on the east along the Red Rock Canyon scenic drive. It's likely one of the more popular scramble routes in the area. However, the standard route approaches Bridge Mountain from the west, not through Pine Creek Canyon (the route described here). The main issue with using the standard route is the bad approach road. If you have a burly vehicle, you can make it to the trailhead from Rocky Gap Road (off the Red Rock scenic drive), or you could come from Lovell Road (which is horrible). If you want to follow that standard route, you can check out my Bridge Mountain standard route trip report. That trip report likely describes the summit block ascent a bit better than this older trip report does.

The route described here adds on miles of fun and gorgeous boulder-hopping through Pine Creek Canyon and Fern Canyon in order to get from the Red Rock Canyon Scenic Drive to the ridge leading to Bridge Mountain, where it meets up with the standard Bridge Mountain Route. It's a longer outing to Bridge Mountain, but I'd say a favorite of mine in Red Rock Canyon. Additinally, accessing the trailhead is trivial, requiring you only drive the Red Rock scenic drive and parking at the Pine Creek Trailhead.

From the Pine Creek Trailhead, Shawn and I followed the Pine Creek Trail leading to the mouth of the canyon. Unfortunately there are a ton of social trails that lead all over the place, making the primary route unclear. The brush got too bad on the northern bank, but eventually we found a reasonable string of trails that allowed us to drop into north fork of Pine Creek Canyon, also known as Fern Canyon. The scenery here is really nice, with narrower sections of canyon, potentially flowing water, and green mosses and ferns. Aside from a ton of Class 2/3 boulder-hopping, we encountered one waterfall that required a gully scramble on its right. If you need more information and pictures with a better description of the route through Fern Canyon, check out my write-up from Bridge Point a few years later.

We continued west through Fern Canyon, more boulder-hopping and talus cave scrambling along the way, eventually making it to the slickrock slabs marking the head of the drainage. We left Fern Canyon and worked generally northeast, following Class 2/3 moves on slabs with great views and occasional light exposure. There was one move in particular toward the top of the route that took us a second to find and decide was the proper route, where a somewhat exposed ledge brought us to the ridge (Class 3/3+). Otherwise, it's a steep and fun reasonable scramble with at least a few options for ascending the slabs. Past this crux, a ledge brought us to the west ridge of Brige Mountain.

At the ridge, we focused our attention east toward Bridge Mountain and followed the standard route. There were some Class 2 slab obstacles along the way, but mostly it's just a gorgeous slickrock walk with excellent views in all directions. Some Class 2 heads up progressively steepening slabs to a short ledge. Past the ledge is the Class 3 crux of the standard route, where a crack leads up to a face, followed by a wide ledge and ultimately to flatter ground where you can find the featured bridge of Bridge Mountain. We headed through the bridge and continued above it, where we took in the sight of an interesting bowl with a small grove of trees known as the "hidden forest". The route continues on a wide rib on the right side of the forest, where a ramp (Class 2/2+) leads up to some more trivial scrambling and ultimately the summit.