Hike East Bitter Ridge Loop Lake Mead National Recreation Area, NV

Jan 24, 2022 — A couple of years ago I hiked to the Bitter Ridge High Point, a long cliff face deep in Lake Mead's Northshore area. The loop we did today is the eastern portion of the lengthy Bitter Ridge formation. While not a particularly crazy interesting hike, it was a nice exploratory outing with some great views above the sheer cliff faces. Reaching our starting point requires decent tires, but the road is overall in surprisingly good shape. From Northshore Road, we headed north here (36.24347, -114.53603) onto Bittersprings Road, then turned left here (36.28256, -114.51794) to reach where we parked.

I should note that the attached map may look a little wonky. The topo is a bit incorrectly drawn, resulting in our track looking like we were hovering over the cliff. There weren't any major surprises along the way. Austin wanted to run through the wash on the way back, so we configured the route to make our first objective Bitter Ridge East Peak, meaning doing the loop clockwise. The ridgeline from our parking spot went at low Class 2, most of the hike being on pleasant terrain with a consistently reasonable slope grade. The summit had a bunch of massive cairns, and the views toward the Fire Range allowed for outlining the many peaks in that group.

We continued west along the ridgeline and were stopped by a pretty sketchy-looking cliff. It's likely you could puzzle out a Class 3/4 route down directly along the ridgeline, but we were interested in a more pleasant hiking day, and ultimately successfully kept our whole route Class 2. Unfortunately, this meant dropping north along the top of the rim until we could locate a nice descent option to escape the cliffs. Now significantly lower than the main Bitter Ridge ridgeline, we decided rather than re-ascending we'd just get to our next peak (Peak 3035) via its northern ridge. Its east face looked a little spooky from afar anyway, and we didn't want to risk getting into dubious terrain.

We asended Peak 3035's north face with some short sections of nice Class 2 scrambling. East Bitter Peak was the next peak to the west, which would require us to drop basically all the way down to the desert floor in order to ascend. Easy slope walking brought us to a wash separating Peak 3035 from East Bitter Peak, where we located a break in the small carved cliff on the west side of the wash. From here it was easy desert walking up to a Class 2 weakness in the south side of the cliff band. The ridgeline leading to East Bitter Peak had some really nice scenic portions overlooking the severe drop on the south face, and there was even a slight view of Lake Mead from its summit.

The most straightforward route down was the northern-trending ridgeline into the desert below. A bunch of jogging through the desert through washes and on old dirt roads brought us to the base of Peak 2753. This minor summit was the final peak of the day, a Class 2 jaunt up its west slope, followed by an almost-runnable southeastern ridgeline descent. The views of Bitter Ridge from this peak were nice in the sunset. We got off Peak 2753 and used a series of washes and roads to get back to the car.