Deep Creek Hot Springs

Author's Comments

Eight miles round trip through a canyon that does not particularly care whether you make it. That is the bargain at Deep Creek, and I think it is part of why the place still feels like a secret even when there are twenty people in the pools. You earn it. The trail drops through rock that has been folded and tilted into something almost theatrical, layers of pale and rust and gray stacked at angles that read better in raking morning light than in the flat blaze of midday. I prefer December here. The air is cold enough that the springs steam properly, rising off the pools and curling against the canyon wall behind them, and the contrast between the geothermal water and the cold creek running alongside is at its most visible. A long exposure on the creek will smooth the cold water into something silvered and ghostly while the hot pools sit still and steaming a few feet away. That is the photograph I keep going back for, though I rarely get it right. Start before sunrise from Bowen Ranch. The first light hits the upper canyon walls maybe an hour into the descent, and if you have timed it well you arrive at the springs as the steam is at its heaviest and the pools are mostly empty. By ten in the morning the day-trippers are arriving and the spell breaks somewhat. By then I am usually working details - mineral staining on the rock, the strange pale green of the algae at the pool edges, the way the cold creek braids around boulders. There is more here than the wide shot suggests. You just have to slow down enough to find it.

Gallery