Goldmyer Hot Spring

 This month for our scout outing we finally made it up to Goldmyer Hot Spring. We've been trying to get here for the last few years and it's never connected. Finally this year we decided to make the reservation in January for our October outing. It was locked in there was nothing that could stand in our way.

I had heard the hot spring itself was cool, but in reality I was unprepared for how fun and cool it actually was. More on that later.

The first part of the fun was the road to the trailhead. According to the Goldmyer website, the Middle Fork Road is very rough and requires high clearance 4x4. That sounds like my kind of place, but usually those types of reports overstate the situation. Luckily, this one did not. It was all sorts of fun getting there. We passed many large holes in the road as well as two pretty good sized washouts.

On the way up we had a pretty constant stream of little misty droplets so I was getting a little nervous about the state of preparedness of the boys. It turned out to be the rainiest backpacking trip I've ever been on. It started raining in earnest 20 minutes into the hike and didn't stop until the early morning. Fortunately we had plenty of tarps.

We had some fun mushrooms growing on the underside of our dinner table log.

This dish was a mixture of two freeze dried meals, one alfredo and one beef strogoff. I called it strogofredo. I can tell you it doesn't make you want to spit it out the second it touches your tongue. They ate it all.

In the morning the rain had quit but everything was still soaked.  I love this Big Agnes Seedhouse tent I got this year. It is MUCH easier to put up than my last tent, which is perfect for when you have to do it in the rain.

 We had a pretty good little tent city going there. You can see everybody standing under our Kelty Noah's Tarp 16. We bought that a number of years ago and we usually don't use it because we don't stay in camps very long and we've had pretty good luck weather-wise. We were very glad to have it this time.

Here are some shots of the hot spring itself. The pools are all manmade, but you can see the hole in the rock in the upper left area of the picture. That's the cave that was hollowed out and then the opening was partially blocked leaving a 30-foot-long hot tub with a cavern ceiling. It was awesome.
 

This is the changing cabana at the hot spring itself. It's a little ways from the camp area, so it's nice to be able to change into dry clothes before trekking back to camp.

Here's the proof that I was there, too.

I can't wait to go back.