Hot Springs?

This last weekend was random and yet so fun! There was a group of us that wanted to hang out and do something, but we wanted to do something different and adventurous, so we went online and found a natural hot springs somewhere in the States that we thought would be fun to check out. By "natural" I mean somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and it's more like a giant hot mud puddle than a pool. You know...the fun kind!

So, we all piled into a few cars and began driving. We didn't really know where we were going and we ended up taking a bunch of wrong turns and having to backtrack a bit. It took us about 2 hours to get there, and we all joked about the fact that there might not even be anything there once we arrived. Well, that's exactly what happened!!

We hiked in in the dark (hardly a hike), and came upon this clearing that looked slightly reminiscent of the clearing that had the hot spring...only this clearing was ravaged by some natural disaster. Seriously, all that remained of our long awaited hot spring was a hot puddle roughly the size of a couch pillow, or a kitchen sink. We defintely could NOT fit 7 people in that hole!!! Somewhere along the line we all became quite motivated to make this puddle into a pool and so we removed our shoes, rolled up our pantlegs, and began digging! I'm not even entirely sure how long we dug for, but we were damming creeks, redirecting streams, and deepening and enlarging our spring. At one point we broke for peanut butter and banana sandwiches, all laying down our rocks and releasing our handfuls of mud, only to pick them up again after we finished. Finally, we decided that it was big enough, changed into our swim suits, and lay in these muddy hot/cold pools. There were areas that were really hot, like skin scalding hot, and other areas where the redirecting of the cold streams just didn't work. But it was SO FUN!!!

After we were finished, we all piled back into the cars stinking like sulfur and looking ragged and dirty to make an attempt to get back into Canada. Thankfully, they believed our story and granted us entrance...they likely just didn't want to talk to us anymore as there was a foul stench wafting out my windows. Hurray hot springs!

That's the size of the puddle right when we arrived...

Beginning the dig...

Peanut butter and banana sandwich break...