South Yuba River - Mountain Dog

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.

( Spoiler Alert: we mistakenly ended up at Mountain Dog instead of Emerald Pools. Click here for the full trip report with pictures and videos. )

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.