Canyoneer Frenchman Mountain Canyon Frenchman Mountain BLM, NV

Oct 16, 2021 — Frenchman Mountain is a big mountain on the eastern outskirts of Las Vegas. It's a really popular hiking spot due to its proximity to the city. It's visible from pretty much anywhere in the city, as is Frenchman Mountain Canyon, a gash in the middle of the peak's western slopes. Most people hiking to the summit use a horrible, steep gravelly service road that starts along East Lake Mead Blvd, a road that many inconsiderate Las Vegans seem to consider a trash dump. The road/trail comes up to a false saddle, then drops, only to regain to get to the true summit. Frenchman Mountain Canyon is accessible at the base of that drop from the false summit. I did that hike once and didn't even write up a trip report because I hated it. Crowded, dusty, and pretty ugly. I highly recommend getting to Frenchman Mountain (and of course, to Frenchman Mountain Canyon) via a much more fun Class 3 and far less-traveled route, via its west face. You can view the full trip report of this ascent here, but since I already documented that I will only include a few photos of it below. Whether you set up a shuttle and come up via the standard trail (purple line on my map, which we did not do on this trip), or chose to take the west face route (no shuttle required, and our chosen route), this trip report assumes you've already made it to the head of Frenchman Mountain Canyon.

We headed down from the head of the canyon through a rocky wash and soon stumbled onto the first rappel. It's actually completely bypassable, but being that I was with two new canyoneers we all thought it was a good idea to do the rappel as a test run. It's the second-longest rappel for the route, anyway. The second rap came shortly after and the views of Las Vegas become quite nice below. Soon we made it into the narrows of the canyon, surprisingly pretty and unexpected. A few short rappels continued through the narrows, and we were able to down-climb a few of the shorter drops. The last two rappels before the final drop were in a tighter section of narrows, and then the last 80-foot drop popped us down into a small alcove where vandals had left an old couch and graffiti on the walls. Ah, back to the city, I suppose.

We continued out of the drainage and took a series of roads and social trails until we got into a rocky drainage, which we used to reach suburbia and made it back to our cars.