Way before the town of Challis I happen to notice that the next road is the turnoff to Challis Hot Springs, so off I go. That saved me about 30 miles of driving – woo!
I really lucked out on this one. The nice mom/owner in the office/bed and breakfast turned me on to site 23, the sweetest spot in the campground! It’s right on the Salmon River, where the river takes an almost right angle turn. There’s a point of hard lava rock right here that changes the river’s mind about where it wants to go. So from the van I look up the river rather than across it. There’s river views in two directions, and a lot of exciting water action at your feet where the river roils around this lava point. The fall colors are peak and the river is lined with golden-yellow cottonwoods. It is a picture postcard view and an all-around perfect spot.
The main pool is 102°-ish, quite warm enough on a fall afternoon. The hot pool is enclosed and is very hot – 110°. For me, the only comfortable place in the hot pool is the steps, where I can be half in half out. In any event, the combo of all the beautiful scenery – the valley, the river, the red rock cliffs, and pretty good pools, and wifi that reaches to the campsite make this place a must re-visit!
Saturday (Oct 19)
Pretty drive out of the Challis Hot Springs Valley to the town, where I had a very nice meal at a new-ish place where they didn’t really seem to know what they were doing, but the food and wifi and waitress were excellent anyway. The place was kind of deluxe, but organized by someone who had never run a restaurant. I would go back!
Today and yesterday driving these wide valleys I have finally gotten a big solid dose of the fall colors I set out to see on my October adventure. The colors along the Salmon River Valley to Stanley were calendar-perfect! The 40 miles after Stanley were also pretty in a standard mountain valley kind of way, but I’m ready for my campsite.
This is time of year is kind of limbo time (Catholic limbo, not dance limbo :) for Forest Service campgrounds. They’ve turned off the water and suspended services for the season, but the days are lovely and the snow hasn’t arrived yet. Some forests bar the gates, but Boise NF leaves ’em open and you can camp for free, bless ’em.
Kirkham Campground is a near perfect hot springs party pad setup. Fifteen-ish campsites across the river from the road, with hot water galore springing from the ground seemingly everywhere. I am arriving on a unusually pleasant Saturday, which paradoxically is a bad thing. Either a bad-weather Saturday, or a pleasant Monday, either would be fine. But the all around perfect conditions on Saturday night mean that a lot of people are here ready to party. Most of the sites are taken, and the soaking areas are almost constantly full.
As it turns out, I don’t actually stick a toe in hot water till morning. I was after all soaking at Challis this very morning and other places for the last ten days, so it isn’t as if I was dying for that soaking experience right now! My best chance woulda been the early evening, but I decided to wait until the full moon popped over the hill. But by then it was party central, cars full of noisy teenagers doing stupid teenager things. Nothing bad or scary, just nothing I wanted to be around.
Sunday
I did soak on this nice, quiet Sunday morning. The pools are not lovely. Sadly, they look like your living room the morning after a raging party. Lots candy wrappers and gross stuff like bandaid covers and pieces of food. The worst was that some dumbass had actually brought glass Budweiser bottles down to the rocks! So of course there is broken glass exactly where everyone goes barefoot clambering over the rocks. People sure can be stupid.
Once I hit the the road I checked out Pine Fats Campground, where my book says there is a hot spring .4 miles down the canyon. I will try that next time, it will probably be quieter.
Idaho 21 follows a very dramatic. steep-walled canyon along the South Fork of the Payette River. Stopped for yummy grilled trout and eggs and wifi at the place I stopped a couple of years ago in Crouch. Then turn north on Idaho 55 up the narrow Payette River Valley, which suddenly opens up into a huge valley, home of Cascade Lake and Payette Lake. Really beautiful wide open country.
The state park campground in McCall was closed for the season – McCall NEVER works for me. I pressed on another 40 miles to Zim’s – the hot springs most likely to get a health violation :). I wouldn’t have even bother with the McCall FAIL, except that my camping app said Zim’s was closed for the season. Their phone also didn’t answer, but I thought I’d drive the mile or so off the main road to see what’s up s long as I was going past anyway.. Sure enough, they were open, but in a typically Zims-ian half-assed way. You could soak in the pools or sleep overnight in their yard, but he’s already shut the water off for the building so you couldn’t take a shower or use the bathroom (porta-potty outside in the 30° weather).
I was planning $25 to stay in a high-end campground in Riggins that sounded really pleasant. I was so committed to this idea that I almost didn’t stay even after driving over here, but I did stay, and had a very nice evening. I did create a little drama for myself – maybe I’ve visited one too many hot springs, because I walked into this one with my car keys in my pocket! They fell out of my pocket because I worked so hard on the pool basketball rim :) When I got back to the van I had a few minutes of panic and went back and some nice folks said they felt something odd on the pool bottom, and it turns out to be my key! The next odd thing was that they left it there! So she had to go to the spot and bring it up with her talented toes. In a tribute to German engineering, the darned thing still works perfectly, after spending probably 35 minutes in a 100 degree, mineral-rich bracelet-corroding pool!
Zim’s is at the edge of a very long, wide valley, and their camping area is just a grassy place with some picnic tables. It has excellent sunsets, and excellent vistas in general. The moon is a day past full, so later that night was very bright. Out in the middle of all these harvest-moon fields with the ground fog welling up it had a real Halloween-y feel to it.
Monday
There was a very scenic low-lying fog in the early morning. Quite foggy and damp – the swim trunks I’d hooked over the mirror were wetter than they were last night! I hung around till 11-ish then headed off to breakfast in Riggins.
I’ve done this run before, and it IS beautiful (until Grangeville). Riggins is a funny little one-street river town, interesting because the Salmon River reappears here on the western side of the state. I was on it in Challis three days ago in eastern Idaho, and boom! here it is again! I still don’t quite get the geography, but there it is. I found a real nice breakfast place with a trippy stream-of-consciousness waitress and good food.
Then, follow the Salmon, which is flowing more or less due north for it’s confluence with the Snake. I’ve been all along here before. White Bird is breathtaking and very interesting historically. Grangeville sucks. The Nez Perce Reservation looks happy and prosperous. Lewiston/Clarkston seem to be New Jersey-like armpits. Industrial, agricultural, and shipping centers, but not much in the way of amenities. Lewiston does claim the distinction of being Idaho’s only seaport!
Lewiston has no plausible grocery stores, so I try my luck across the bridge in Clarkston, Oregon. The Albertson’s there was utterly ghetto in it’s lack of fresh food choices. These towns are best left behind quickly. My campground – Hell’s Canyon State Park four miles south of town, looked good on the web, but is a pretty stupid place in actual fact when you get there.
It is shady, and the camp is quiet, but there is an extremely busy highway right across the Snake River – you can hear motorcycles, semis and worst, old Oregon beaters with dying mufflers roaring down the road basically every moment of the day and night.
The campground is kind of deluxe or faux deluxe and kind of expensive, as state parks often are. There are free showers, and a nice path along the river. There are trails into the hills, but they are horse trails so they are extremely dusty and a little poopy. Aw what the hell, I had a good time here tonight!
Tuesday
My love/hate relationship with this place continues this morning with something to love:
— the bathrooms are heated on a chilly October morning!
and something to hate:
— a state park minion knocked on my window and hassled me for more money, DESPITE the very clear understanding I with a different state park minion last night.
Idaho State Parks have a fee structure from hell. $5 entrance fee on top of the camping fee, sales tax on the camping fee but not the entrance fee. Cheaper camping (“tent camping”) if you don’t use utilities but the tent camping area is closed for the season, so the only p[lace so park is at a full utility campsite. As per the guy last night, don’t use the utilities, don’t pay for ’em. But … since I looked like an RV to the guy driving around, he wanted more money. I assured him I had not touched their stupid electricity so eventually he went away with a little bit of bad feeling all around.
He did however give me a good breakfast recommendation – Hazel’s, the place to go in Clarkston. No wifi, so I spent the two hours after Hazel’s in the Library, figuring out what to do between here and my appointment with the van repair folks on Friday. Washington state campgrounds are very expensive and there are no national forest campgrounds in this part of the world. But my research shows a whole bunch of Army Corps of Engineers campgrounds along the various reservoirs on the Snake River. One of these funky little places is tonight’s plan.
Because of yesterday’s time zone change, I ran out of daylight way quicker than I thought I would. I did get going an hour early, but I frittered away that extra hour at the library, somehow forgetting for the moment that sunset would also be an hour ahead of schedule. So I enjoy the library for too long and I don’t really factor in the time for stopping at a deli for a salad and shopping at the Safeway. After an hour or so of driving I start getting hungry and I am afraid that salad ain’t going to cut it, so I blow another half hour stopping at a cool little roadhouse to get a takeout bbq pork sandwich. I get to my desolate little parking lot down by the reservoir only a few minutes before sunset.