Bridge to Nowhere Trail

The East Fork of the San Gabriel River is with you almost from the moment you leave the trailhead. The canyon begins narrow and surprisingly green, with trees arching over the river and long stretches of shade as you follow the water deeper into the San Gabriel Mountains. Before long you reach the first crossing, step into the river, and discover what makes this hike different. These aren’t little rock hops. Even when the water is low, it can reach halfway up your calves with a current pushing steadily against your legs. In wetter months it can rise above your knees, and rocks and logs that once offered an easy route across may have disappeared with the last flood. Bring water shoes and trekking poles and expect to get wet—you’ll be crossing the river again and again.

For much of the first half of the hike, you stay within this shaded riparian world, moving between stretches of trail and river as the canyon gradually widens around you. Eventually the trees fall away and you emerge into a vast floodplain of sand, gravel and rock. The openness is beautiful, but this is also where the route becomes deceptive. Footpaths wander everywhere, many looking every bit like the trail you should follow. Keep your offline map close. The route eventually crosses the broad canyon toward a steep embankment on the opposite side, where a short, sharp climb carries you out of the floodplain and onto the remains of an abandoned mountain road.

Suddenly you’re high above the river in full sun. Pieces of old pavement still appear beneath your feet, but much of the road has become a relatively level gravel path cut into the mountainside, with the canyon and river spread out below. In places the road itself has washed away, leaving narrower traverses around the missing sections. Then you round a bend and there it is: an enormous concrete bridge spanning the canyon, complete and intact, with no road leading anywhere beyond it.

The Bridge to Nowhere is the surviving piece of a 1930s road project abandoned after floods destroyed much of the route, and arriving here at road level makes the story suddenly visible. You can imagine the highway that was supposed to continue through these mountains, while everything around the bridge shows just how thoroughly the canyon had other plans. Today the bridge is on private property and is home to the bungee operation, with hikers permitted to pass through. On jumping days, you may arrive just in time to watch someone step off the edge and disappear toward the canyon below.

We continue across the bridge, negotiate another narrow section beyond it and work our way back down to the river. This is where you’ll want to stay awhile. Small waterfalls and swimming holes sit beneath the bridge, giving you a place to pull out lunch, cool off in the water and watch the bungee jumpers overhead before beginning the long journey back.

The return retraces the same country, but Bridge to Nowhere has one more lesson waiting: every river crossing, washed-out section and route-finding decision that brought you here still stands between you and the trailhead. Depending on where you were able to park—and how much exploring you do around the bridge—the day can easily stretch beyond ten miles.

By the time the canyon begins to narrow again and the shade of the lower East Fork closes around you, you’ve done much more than hike to an unusual landmark. You’ve followed a river deep into the mountains, crossed it again and again, climbed onto the remains of a road that nature erased, and found the one extraordinary piece it left behind.