This Couple Trekked to 100 Hot Springs While Living in Their Van

Our friends Greg & Jess of Drifter Journey have been living full time in their van since 2018 and are true hot springs explorers. Read their story of visiting 100 hot springs below.

"You know what that smells like?" Greg said.

We spoke at the same time:"Failure," I said. 

"A Barn," he said.

We'd just bushwhacked for 45 minutes through the fallen tangled timber of an area devastated by a forest fire 5 years ago to find a hot spring.  This is not an unusual occurrence for us.  We've spent many hours researching and seeking hot springs that are remote, hard to find, and rarely visited. Springs like this one are some of our favorites because they can be hidden gems and most of the fun is in finding it.

The discovery was more significant, however, because this was our 100th hot spring.  A goal that we'd set somewhat arbitrarily earlier this summer, this moment was a culmination of our love of hot springs and our willingness to search very remote places for them.

The summer of 2020 was supposed to be our push to Alaska in our van. It's been on our bucket list for our whole lives, but with the COVID-19 outbreak and Canada closing its borders, we were forced to change our plans.  What could possibly be a better replacement for exploring the remote and beautiful wilderness that is Alaska than seeking out wild hot springs in the lower 48?

To be fair, we'd already had a list of hot springs we visited over our years of adventuring and had visited about 45 already before we started this quest.  We've always loved hot springs and enjoy finding new ones everywhere we go.  Once we realized Alaska was not happening, we decided it would be fun to spend a summer trying to get to 100 unique hot springs during our summer travels.

The journey began in Idaho, an epicenter of geothermal activity.  As we traveled, we utilized guidebooks, the internet, and word of mouth to find hot springs along the way.  The beauty of central Idaho is that there are so many hot springs, you can visit several in a day.  We spent many weeks in Idaho just hopping from one hot spring to the next.

Not all hot springs are created equal.  Some are a little too hot, like the hobo pool outside of Saratoga, WY, which hovers around 108, sometimes hotter.

Some are just a little too cold, like Wild Rose Hot Springs near Craters of the Moon National Monument.  That one would be perfect on a hot day, but at barely 99 degrees it's more of a warm spring, and was a bit chilly on the windy, overcast day we visited.

Others are mucky, full of algae, silt or dead bugs.  At one spring, we spent about 2 hours cleaning out a pool on the side of a hill that had experienced a forest fire, resulting in continuous erosion of the slope into the hot spring.  But once the work was finished, we had a nice soak in a very rarely-visited hot spring.

Not all pools can be restored to a soakable level though.  A new experience for us at hot springs was the discovery of red spider mites.  We’d read about them in our guidebook and didn’t find them at several pools where they were listed.  Just when we started to think it was a hoax, we showed up to a hot spring and found huge amounts of them all over the bank and in the edges of the pool.  For the sake of our cause, Greg still got in for a very quick soak.

When we reached our 100th hot spring and realized the cow smell was from an old, dried up pool that was no longer useable, we went into hot springs survey mode:Water temp? Hot, Very Hot

Spider Mites? No

Source of Cold Water? Yes, but difficult to control

Pool Construction?  A few logs, but tarp is required

We got to work.  Setting up the tarp between logs, we tried to divert enough cold and hot together in order to make a tub of soakable water.  In the end, we sat in about 6 inches of water that changed between scaldingly hot and ice cold.  After about 10 minutes of fiddling with rocks, logs, and the tarp, we just enjoyed the scenery for a little bit and packed up.

Once we got back to the van, Greg got out our notebook to add the hot springs to our list and realized that we had miscounted before we left.  We actually just visited our 99th hot spring!  While it may seem silly, I wanted our 100th hot spring to be a really rewarding experience.  I felt relieved and also excited that our goal was still around the corner.  At the same time, we weren’t planning which springs to visit in any specific order, so there was still a chance it could be a bust.

In the end, our 100th hot spring ended up being a beautiful riverside soak that we will always remember.  It was a well-constructed pool right by the river with water that was the perfect temperature.  It was amazing.  I can say with confidence that some of the worst hot springs we visited are also some of the most memorable.  It’s not always about how nice the pool is, or hot hot the water is.  Sometimes it just comes down to the adventure along the way.

We’ve had many memorable moments seeking hot springs and each one takes us on a new and exciting journey.  Some are worth going back to, while we won’t be stopping at others anytime soon (looking at you, red spider mites).  We appreciate the local caretakers who maintain the pools and we do our best to help out.  If you enjoy hot springs as much as us, you’ll come to appreciate hot springs etiquette like leaving it better than you found it, not using soap or shampoo in the springs, and not sharing special and remote ones online (just to name a few).

– Greg & Jess

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