White Rock Hills

April 02, 2026

White Rock Hills

White Rock Hills - 1970M

308M Prominence

36.16870, -115.49558

April 2, 2026

600M Ascent and descent

3H 22M C2C, 3H 5M Moving

4.7KM

White Rock Hills, as it is sometimes referred to, is the peak on the northern end of the Red Rocks loop in Nevada. It does not quite stand out like the others as it doesn't have any big buttresses on it's flanks, and is a bit smaller, but it still looks pretty cool from the road either way. With a day to myself in order to take a break from climbing, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a hike and make a quick ascent of the peak. I got dropped off in the morning at the parking area at the end of Willow Springs road, as my friends were going to climb Birdland. I had a GPX route downloaded so I roughly followed it, but for the most part navigation was not too complicated, and I made my way up and left, traversing at the base of some steeper walls and avoiding them. There wasn't really a trail, but I did come across the odd cairn, increasing so around the 1750M mark. The sandstone terrain offered some scrambly bits in spots, as the rock was bulgy at times. Eventually after hiking for a while I made it up to a sort of col between the summit which was not really visible, and a steep sub summit bump. I then walked across some sandstone slabs, which took me to a bit of a traverse around the south west side of the summit. At this point I kind of lost trail and started ascending whatever terrain seemed to make sense to me. I think I made a bit of a mess out of it, as I ended up climbing some fifth class steps on the North side of the summit. This was definitely the crux of the day, but it was entirely avoidable if I would have just taken a few extra minutes to try and make sense of the terrain. I remember it being a bit hard to interpret the terrain as there is bulges of sandstone and sort of gulleys between them. The summit was yet another cool boulder, and offered great views of Bridge Mountain, and the bright red rocks of Calico Hills to the East. Before I even started descending I knew I was NOT going to take my ascent route for the first part, as downclimbing 5th class terrain is not something I want to do. It turns out the standard descent was simply to the south of the Summit block and I quickly made my way back down to the part of the trail I had made a wrong turn up on the ascent. The tricky thing about this area and why hiking less than 5 km takes over 3 hours is the ridiculous amount of micro terrain. The cacti and spiky bushes don't help either. Having remembered most of the terrain from the ascent though, I was able to make pretty good time on the descent, I still had to consult my GPX from time to time, but when I made it back down people where quite confused at what I was doing as there was walking tours happening on the trails at the parking lot. I then hiked back up the Willow Springs road to the Red Rocks loop road and hitchhiked to the parking lot for Birdland in order to find my friends again.