Overview

Red Needle Trail is a technically easy, but demanding, 4-mile round-trip hike through The Valley of the Pillars, a geologically interesting area with craggy, colorful cliffs, red soils, and grand scenery. The trail follows a 2-track road, which technically is an illegal road, where some parts are badly torn up by drivers spinning their tires in soft soils and sandy washes.

The destination for this hike is Red Needle, a curious geologic spire that is capped with a conglomerate rock composed of ancient cobbles from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which is a curious geologic story.

This hike is located in the Rainbow Gardens Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC), which has been proposed for protection from development as the East Las Vegas National Monument.

Link to map or elevation profile.

Watch Out

Other than the standard warnings about hiking in the desert, ...this is a fairly safe hike. Some parts of the trail are very steep with gravel atop rock and hard dirt, making for ball-bearing slipping hazards. The trailhead is in a not-the-safest area, so don't leave anything in your vehicle that someone might find interesting.

While hiking, please respect the land and the other people out there, and try to Leave No Trace of your passage. Also, this hike is fairly short, but be sure to bring what you need of the 10 Essentials.

Getting to the Trailhead

Red Needle Trail is located on the southeast side of Frenchman Mountain, the mountain that forms the eastern boundary of the Las Vegas Valley, about 30 minutes east of downtown Las Vegas.

From downtown, drive east to Hollywood Blvd, the last major north-south thoroughfare on the east edge of town. Drive south on Hollywood Blvd. Past the intersection with Desert Inn Road, Hollywood narrows, leaves the urban area, bends left, passes a sewage treatment plant, and heads into the desert. The pavement ends, but Hollywood continues as a graded dirt road. Past the pavement, drive east for 2.0 miles to Lava Butte Road, on the left. There are no street signs, but this is the third left. Turn onto Lava Butte Road and drive north 1.4 miles to a wide area between post-and-cable fencing. Park here; this is the Red Needle Trailhead.

The Hike

From the trailhead (Table 1, Waypoint 01), the Red Needle Trail lies due east, but a steep-sided, deep gully separates the trailhead from the trail, so the hike begins by walking 0.2 miles farther up Lava Butte Road to where the deep gully is shallow enough to get across (Wpt. 02).

Crossing the gully, the Red Needle Trail turns south to run between the gully below and a rocky ridge above. When the trail (actually a 2-track road) is back to about even with the trailhead, it forks (Wpt. 03). The trail turns left to head east around the south end of the craggy ridge.

Heading generally east, the trail winds northward and southward to cross several gullies and low ridges before turning northeast and dropping into a sandy wash at about 0.4 miles out. For the next 0.7 miles, the trail follows this wash downstream.

In this area, overall, vegetation is sparse, but in the washes, where there is more water and perhaps better soils, the vegetation is more lush. Watch for common species such as Big Galleta Grass, Creosote Bush, Catclaw Acacia (aka Wait-A-Minute Bush if you get too close), and Fremont's Dalea (Indigo Bush). Keep an eye out for less common species too, particularly Silverleaf Sunray with large, blue-green leaves and huge yellow sunflowers in the spring.

The geology is interesting too. Watch the cutbanks along the wash for curious layers of different colored rocks and thin dikes of white gypsum crystals that cut through the layers and fill narrow cracks. On a larger scale, the landscape is tilted layers of sedimentary rocks (Horse Spring Geologic Formation) that probably originated in lake basins some 17 million years ago. The harder rocks, now forming the higher ridges, are largely gray-brown, but mixed with reds, tans, and even yellow layers.

At about 0.75 miles out, hikers get nice views down the canyon to the northeast. Two pinnacles and a "volcano" come into view. The closer and larger pinnacle is named Pinnacle (or Thumb Pinnacle), the smaller pinnacle is named Red Needle. In the background, Lava Butte, the apparent volcano, is not a volcano at all but rather a laccolith. Laccoliths are formed by magma pushing upward through existing sedimentary rocks, but not breaking through. Laccoliths deform the overlying layers and solidify underground, forming a dome-shaped solid mass. When the overlaying softer rocks erode away, the volcanic laccolith is revealed. Lava Butte formed about 13 million years ago and tilted with the surrounding landscape, so we don't actually see the dome, rather we see the edge sticking up.

Still heading down the sandy wash, at about 1.2 miles out, the wash merges with another wash coming in from the north and together they bend east. At this confluence (Wpt. 04), the Red Needle Trail continues straight (north) to go up the other wash heading towards the Pinnacle, which is visible at this point. For people not paying attention, it would be easy to just turn right and head down the main wash to the southeast.

Still heading more-or-less north, the Red Needle Trail soon climbs out of the wash onto an illegal 2-track road and begins climbing across sparsely vegetated desert soils towards the Pinnacle. In this area, the Creosote Bushes are sparse and stunted, and a few Beavertail Pricklypear dot the landscape, but few plants grow here. At about 1.36 miles out, Red Needle Trail drops to cross a broad wash where the contrast in the amount of vegetation is striking.

Climbing out the other side of the broad wash still following the illegal 2-track road, the Red Needle Trail begins climbing gently, then rather steeply towards the Pinnacle.

Approaching the Pinnacle, hikers will notice that it is formed of two types of rock. The base is formed of layered, red mudstones and siltstones with some cobbles mixed in. The upper part is reddish-gray conglomerate composed of Precambrian gneiss and rapakivi granite, the same rocks that make up the bottom of the Grand Canyon. How they got here is beyond the scope of a hiking route description, but the story reads like a crazy and complicated geologic conspiracy theory. Read about it in Geologic Tours in the Las Vegas Area (Tingley et al., 2008) or Roadside Geology of Nevada (DeCourten and Bigger 2017).

As the Red Needle Trail passes below the Pinnacle (Wpt. 05), hikers will notice boulders on both sides of the trail that fell from the top of the Pinnacle. This is a good chance to closely inspect the ancient gneiss and rapakivi granite components of the conglomerate. These cobbles are more than 1 billion years old.

Passing the Pinnacle, the trail climbs rather steeply onto a saddle, and from there hikers get grand views and a good look at the remaining route to the Red Needle: a very steep descent into a gully, then an almost equally steep climb up to the ridgeline at the Red Needle (Wpt. 06). This high ridgeline provides grand views north and south, and of course, a good view of Red Needle, which is composed of the same layers and same ancient conglomerate as the Pinnacle.

From Red Needle (Wpt. 06) or from just the Pinnacle (Wpt. 05), return to the trailhead (Wpt. 01) by following your footprints in the dust back down the trail to the south.