South Yuba River - Mountain Dog

[flyminion]

I had planned to take a swimming hole vacation to Tennessee this summer, but I had been waiting for a period of ideal weather, and it was becoming obvious that that was not going to happen in the southeast this summer. One of my top picks for Tennessee (Rock Island State Park) was closed for swimming due to dam maintenance upstream, and the area (well, the southeast in general, really) had been getting so much rain that some people were caught in a flash flood at Cummins Falls not too long ago. I had planned on doing a California swimming hole excursion at some point, possibly next year, but in light of the uncooperative weather on the east coast, I decided to bump that up to this summer and postpone Tennessee for fairer weather. My friend Cade recently moved out to California and said that I should come visit, as he had been wanting to do outdoorsy things but didn’t know anyone who was willing to do them. We had originally planned to take this vacation the week of July 21. I didn’t think much research was necessary since California is reliably hot and dry during the summer, but shortly before our trip, I discovered that the rivers were swollen due to the record snowfall this winter (the snow was still melting at higher elevations and feeding the rivers), so most of the swimming holes I had picked out were currently un-swimmable. I was not looking for a repeat of last year’s washout, so we decided to postpone until August to give the rivers time to recede. I flew in last night, and we still weren’t exactly sure where we wanted to start. We were too tired to research it, so we decided to wait until morning. When we got up this morning, we decided we wanted to start at Yosemite and work our way up to the Yuba River area north of Lake Tahoe, but hotel prices anywhere convenient to Yosemite were a bit steep for any place that had vacancies, so we decided to start with the Yuba area and work our way south, perhaps skipping Yosemite altogether (at least for this year).

It was nearly 1 PM by the time we got our hotel situation squared away, ate lunch, and got on the road, so we were going to have to do something that could be done in a couple of hours. There is one hike on the Yuba River that is pretty close to our motel, but it has at least four different swimming holes, and I didn’t want to rush that one. There was another pretty cool looking place called Emerald Pools on the South Yuba River that seemed to have the highlights all concentrated in the same spot, and it was only about a half mile hike from the road, so we decided we would hit that one.

The road to get there was a narrow mountain road that switchbacked down the side of a deep gorge. At the bottom of the hill, the South Yuba River flowed under a high bridge.



The water looked very clean and clear, and I was already getting excited. I thought there was supposed to be a parking lot near the bridge, but cars (lots and lots of cars) were parked along the side of the road. We were able to snag a parking spot near the bridge, but a woman told us that a cop was going around and ticketing every car that did not have all four tires off the road. There was no way we could get all four tires off the road in that spot, so we drove across the bridge, and the road turned to gravel. We drove past a bunch of cars with tickets on their windshields. All of those cars were parked next to “No Parking” signs, so we drove up the hill a little bit and parked beyond where the signs ended. I had recently purchased the book Swimming Holes of California by Timothy H. Joyce, and according to his directions, the trail to Emerald Pools was the second trail after crossing the bridge. There were trails on both sides of the road immediately after the bridge ended, and it was unclear if one of these was the “second” trail. After starting up an unsure path and turning around, we went up an obvious but fairly unworn path a little farther up the road. Cade wanted to just go back to the bridge and walk along the river, but I insisted we go this way because we were eventually going to have to bypass a waterfall. The path was a bit hard to find in some places, but Timothy Joyce says in his book that the trail is a bit “unsure” in some areas. However, he said something about the trail going around a knoll and passing by some sort of memorial site, and we never saw anything like that. Some of the trail was so overgrown that it was almost like bushwhacking in certain areas. I checked the GPS, and it looked like we were coming up to a side creek that fed into the river near the swimming hole. I didn’t remember Emerald Pools having a side creek, but it had been a while since I had researched it, so I didn’t think much of it. Eventually this faint path came to a T-intersection with a much better path that followed the tributary downstream to the river. Just as we were crossing the tributary creek where it fed into the river, Cade mentioned that the creek spilled into the river via a small waterfall.



When we saw the side waterfall, I instantly realized why the directions weren’t adding up: I had taken us to the wrong place! This was not Emerald Pools. This was Mountain Dog, another swimming hole much farther downstream. I had read about and even seen a news report on Mountain Dog from a Sacramento news affiliate, and I had thought it looked just okay, but not as enticing as other swimming holes on the Yuba River. Normally I laugh at people who get led astray by their GPS, because I never just punch the name of a swimming hole into the GPS and take for granted that it is going to take me to the correct place. For this reason, I always check the location using Google Earth satellite imagery to confirm that it is correct and create my own custom marker in Google Maps, rather than relying on Google’s markers. When planning this trip, I had marked all the swimming holes I knew of on the Yuba River in the interest of being thorough, even though I was not necessarily interested in all of them, so I had created a custom marker for Mountain Dog. Google Maps has Mountain Dog incorrectly labeled as Emerald Pools, so when I thought I was bringing up my custom marker for Emerald Pools, I was actually bringing up the incorrectly labeled Google Maps marker.



The first picture is the real Emerald Pools in Google Maps, and the second picture is Mountain Dog. I didn’t catch this ahead of time because I saw one of my custom markers (the yellow star icon) next to where the map said “Emerald Pools”, and the overall setup of Mountain Dog is the same as Emerald Pools (the swimming hole is about half a mile downstream of a road bridge in both cases). I couldn't believe I had made such a noob mistake.

Anyway, now that I’m done making excuses for my butthurt-inducing screw-up, let’s get back to Mountain Dog. Cade and I worked our way down the rocks to a large pool a few hundred feet downstream of where the side waterfall spilled in.



I was hot and wasted no time getting into the water. It was 76° F according to my thermometer, which felt pretty good after the unnecessary detour we had taken to get here. There was a rock about eight feet above the water on the river-left side of the pool, and I went underwater to see if it was deep enough to jump.



I went down a few feet and didn’t find the bottom, so I climbed on top of the rock and asked some people who were there when we got there if it was safe to jump. They said yes, so I did. I then got my diving mask to look around under the water. The pool was pretty deep, probably about 25 feet at the deepest point. Cade got in, and we jumped a few times. There was another potential jumping place that was a little higher (maybe 12 feet or so) on the opposite side of the river, but you had to jump out to clear some rocks beneath it.



I asked Cade to stand at the point I would need to jump past and went up to the top of the rock, but I wussed out because I am not confident in my leaping abilities, and the clarity of the water gave the illusion that I was a lot higher up than I really was. Cade and I traded places, and he jumped off.

I wanted to go upstream and take a picture of the waterfall, but I didn’t want to have to put my shoes back on twice, so we worked our way along the rock with bare feet. Some of the rocks were smooth, but others were rough like lava rocks. I stood under the waterfall, and it was significantly colder than the river.



I got into the pool next to the waterfall, but it was not over my head in most places.



Here is a compilation of video clips from the swimming hole and the waterfall area just upstream:

Watch on YouTube

After we were finished, we took an easy walk back to the car along the main trail, which was a lot easier than the side path we had taken. Here are some pictures from the hike back:





Timothy Joyce starts out his chapter on Mountain Dog by saying, “Here is a swimming hole for the bad planner.” Touché. In summary, I wasn’t terribly impressed by Mountain Dog, but my opinion of it might have been biased due to ending up there by mistake. It was basically just a deep spot in a river with no terribly striking geographical features, but it does get a couple of points for having a safe jump and clear blue water. It was almost like a Florida spring in a rugged river gorge. The ease of access and short walk to get there make it an ideal family swimming hole, but it might be a little underwhelming if you’re looking for something a little more “adult”. I’m still sort of disappointed that I screwed up with the GPS, but I guess there are worse places to end up by accident. Today’s trek definitely has me excited to see the swimming holes on the South Yuba River that I actually intend to visit.