Trip Report 2/17/2022

Been a while! Drove in through bradford, road was icy from Tuesday snow but totally doable. Icy patches in town were more sketchy than that final stretch of 173. No cars parked when we got there around 8:30am. Surprising amount of snow on the trail! Probably 3 inches holding on in some parts, so happy to see after a brutally dry January. As we got closer to the descent to deep creek, I thought the snow would fade but there was actually snow all the way to the springs! Found a hiking pole at the intersection of family canyon and pct and ran into a woman hiking the pct immediately after that. Got to the springs around 9:45am. The pools were so clean! Nobody soaking, saw a big camp in the trees of what turned out to be about 10 people. Spoke to one of them and they were very nice, had camped out during the snow storm and full moon and said it had indeed snowed all down at the springs. They were going around with garbage bags picking up trash. The springs were spotless! They all left later that morning.

And, somebody had brought a whole bunch of sandbags, i assume they filled them with the sand that washed up in the serenity pool. The sand bags were lining the serenity pool and diverting the crab cooker source to make some other mini pools. There were even extra sandbags to use. Not sure if this group was the same. Additionally there was concrete work visible at the bottom of the anniversary pool and at the channel that can be used to divert it to the womb.
Crowd was mostly textiles and mostly on psychedelics. Everyone was pretty chill, groups of 6 and several smaller couples, individuals, one family with 3 kids and some dogs throughout the day. Pretty busy for a Thursday but nothing surprising. No sign of machete man thankfully!