I went to the springs yesterday. Checked the DOT website, and there was no longer a posting about Highway 173, so I drove up 18. Soon as I got atop the mountains, though the roads were plowed, I started seeing "chains required" signs (are they required up there in the winter, regardless of conditions?) and broke traction a couple of times. So I turned around and drove back down Highway 18 before I even got to the Bradford Ridge trailhead.
Decided to drive up the Cajon Pass to Bowen Ranch, and just see if the river was too high or now. Bowen Ranch road was a bit worse for wear for the recent rain, but not terrible. Nothing that made me sweat too much in my tiny little Toyota Corolla. Hiked to the springs and found the river to be high, but not too high or too fast moving to wade across. It was about thigh-deep.
The Womb Pool is indeed nowhere near as warm as it used to be. I used a random towel that was floating in the Anniversary pool to plug the Anniversary Pool's drain to the "shower," and thus divert its runoff to the womb. That warmed the womb up a little bit, but not to its former level. The Berlin Wall (seen in some of my pix below) may have had something to do with that (it is ugly), but I doubt it. The Berlin Wall plug was open, so it wasn't much impeding flow into the womb. More significant, I suspect, is that all the many little seeps on the wall above the Womb and above the Anniversary pool, which are not flowing right now. I think the womb also has hot stuff come up from its bottom, and I didn't feel any of the usual warm upwellings from there. I'm wondering if something geologic has happened underground to cool off the womb? Or possibly related to the draining of the underground water table by agriculture, due to the drought? I know that farmers don't pump from the hot spring's water source, but perhaps water that would normally flow into whatever ultimately supplies the DCHS source is now flowing more into the overall water table (because it's empty), rather than seeping into places where it gets warmed in the earth and then pushed out of the DCHS hot water source?
Met a poster on these forums (forgot the name, sorry -- I'm terrible with name) and had a nice chat during our soak. He suggested that we all make a practice of, when we're just about to hike down the MoFo hill (at that little area where there's cell phone service), look down to see if we see any campers/tents. If we see them, call the Ranger dispatch and report it. If we all did it consistently enough, they might send out rangers frequently to ticket people (revenue!), and then word might spread that you can't get away with that.
Pix from yesterday below.
Joel
