The Bridge to Nowhere Hike - Angeles National Forest

Our friend Nik invited us to hike with him this weekend... but then he had to work and could not make it at the last minute. We decided to continue on the hike regardless, as we are moving soon and want to use our weekends wisely.

We had never heard of this hike before, despite our decent knowledge of the great California hikes. It turns out that the hike is somewhere near Azusa, CA about 15 miles into the Angeles National Forest. The hike is not so advertised, possibly because the 1/4 mile in every direction of the "bridge" itself is owned privately by the only legal bungee jumping company in California. You must be quite motivated to jump if you're willing to hike the 4.5 miles and another 4.5 miles back (totaling 9 miles) just to plummet between a canyon.

As for the bridge, it's called a bridge to nowhere because it literally leads no where. Originally, the ANF wanted to build a road/bridge to connect to another road in the forest and was successful in their attempts... until a flood storm hit and washed away much of the road that lead the bridge itself (created by prison workers in the 1930's). To learn more, click here.Our hike was fun. We crossed a river back and forth as the trail changed (or we mistakenly got off track), but crossing was inevitable. It was actually quite refreshing and a few times, it even reached our knees! We chose to change our shoes and put on our Crocs every time we reached water so that we didn't have to deal with sopping socks like we had read about. It took a bit longer and turned a 5-hour hike into a 6-hour journey instead... and we were okay with that.

Here are some photos from our journey. Ray is turning into quite the artist with his photos and was able to trap the beauty of the incredible butterflies we saw. We need to gear up for our Half Dome hike in August. Mt. Whitney was 2 years ago already and we're definitely not in as good of shape as we were for that hike of a lifetime.

It takes awhile to post pictures on the blog... so every now and again, I might be linking to my facebook account to see all the pictures. I usually post the same ones and more there. I also post more comments on facebook because it's way faster and the pictures are larger. There's almost 60 pictures posted if you click here.

The ever so evil Yucca plant that enjoyed showing me how much it disliked me...

A piece of the road that was washed out by floods in the 1930's.

This is the view from the top of what the bungee jumpers get to face on their fall down.

The infamous "bridge to nowhere"

Isn't this beautiful!

There's Ray cutting through some serious foliage.

Can you spot the lizard? He's rockin' the camo as he basks in his element.

The man of the house. He and his friends welcomed us many times over on the hike.