"The Green Bridge"

For the third day of this year’s California swimming hole marathon, Cade and I hiked down (waaay down) to another place on the North Fork American River. It doesn’t seem like a very well-known spot, so I will refer to it as “The Green Bridge” (not its real name) so as not to give away the location. I had been wanting to check out more of this particular river but didn’t know much about accessing it, and I discovered this particular spot by scanning Google Earth until I found a footbridge that crossed the river. When I figured out the name of the trail, I was able to find a little bit of information about it as well as a couple of YouTube videos that made it look like this place would deliver the goods from a swimming hole standpoint. I had scheduled this trip’s swimming hole excursions such that we visited the more obscure places on the weekend, and we did the higher elevation (i.e., cooler air temperature) hikes on the days forecasted to be the hottest (which are today and tomorrow). The trailhead is at a higher elevation, the trail is mostly shaded, and it doesn’t have much of a social media presence, which made it ideal for a Saturday with an excessive heat warning.

( Click here for the full trip report with pictures and videos )

In summary, “The Green Bridge” had some pretty sweet swimming holes with numerous jumping options. The water was a little warmer than I would have liked given the excessive heat, but I’m guessing the water is probably much cooler under normal conditions. The people at Yankee Jim's the other day (which is farther downstream) said the water there was unusually warm this year, so I’m guessing the same is true for the Green Bridge area. One pleasant surprise was that the bottom of the river wasn’t covered in silt and algae, so today it ended up being more like the South Yuba was in 2017 and 2019. We hardly saw anyone today, so it seems I was correct about this place being lesser known. However, if you want to go, you definitely have to work for it, so that probably deters the lazy boomboxing litterbugs. It seems like it might be more ideal to camp here to avoid having to hike in and out on the same day. I had marked more nearby swimming holes on Google Earth to check out, but we were trying to conserve our energy today and stayed near the bridge, since there was plenty to explore there. I would definitely be interested in returning to this area and exploring more of the river, but ideally under less harsh weather conditions.