I hit a bunch of hot springs last weekend and wanted to report on the status of them. I drove to Saline Valley Saturday morning. I saw a couple Jeeps pulled over due to car trouble. I found the drive to be grueling and slow but nothing too bad for my subaru forester, I aired down my tires to 20psi to avoid getting a flat. Went in through the South pass and arrive around noon, took 2 hours longer than I expected. As I was driving in many were leaving and when I got to the lower springs it was almost totally empty, I talked to a guy who had been there who said everyone was leaving because of the potential for rain/snow and the possibility that the higher altitude parts of the road might get snowed in making them impassable and trapping us in the valley. This made me nervous and along with the extreme wind at that time(nonstop 40mph with 60mph gusts) which wasn't forecast to abate until 9pm, I decided to head out while I still had plenty of daylight. I went out the North Pass which is a much easier drive, the road is not pure rocks and has more dirt, but there was snow on some parts of the higher altitude road that I could see being more of an issue than the south pass. The precipitation coming this week will probably make that approach difficult. I came out at Big PIne and headed for Buckeye Hot Springs at Bridgeport, I got there around 6pm right at sunset and there were about 6 cars at the lot. I noticed the new path to the springs which is marked by little orange flags, when I got down to the pools by the creek I saw a chunk of the rock that forms the cave had fallen down into the pools, this was probably at the 6th pool down from the hottest one. I assume this was from the high runoff last year which probably created a lot of erosion on that rock formation. I then thought I'd check out travertine and some mammoth pools because I didn't love the company at Buckeye. When I got to Travertine it was way too crowded, I got out of my car and heard ppl standing around saying they were waiting for other people to "free up that pool" and then 4 more cars pulled into the lot, so I didn't even bother trying to soak. Got in my car and drove down to Mammoth where I stayed in a pool that I won't mention to protect its slight secrecy, mostly locals who worked on the mountain there and they were good company so I spent a couple hours with them. Side note, another reason I left Saline was because of the jets, I thought they only did practice flights on weekdays but I heard them multiple times flying overhead on a Saturday. Not a relaxing vibe!
