Candy Rock & Blue Streak - Part 2

Since the past couple of days of our vacation were spent doing filler activities due to not being able to get out of our reservations near Yosemite while the park was closed, Cade and I decided we would spend the last two days of our vacation re-visiting some of the highlights from last year’s trip, rather than take a chance on new swimming holes that may or may not be good. Cade had been itching to go to Blue Streak all week, so that was our plan for today. After last year's visit, we hadn’t been super impressed with Candy Rock, which is about a mile upstream on the same river, but we had neglected to check out some of the pools upstream of the main attraction, so I wanted to do that while we were there. Specifically, there was a photo from Timothy Joyce’s Swimming Holes of California book that had piqued my interest for Candy Rock when I was planning swimming holes for last year’s trip, and after we went, it occurred to me that we never actually saw the pool in the photo. I figured it must have been upstream of the main swimming hole, so I e-mailed Tim, and he confirmed this to be the case. I marked a pool on Google Earth that I thought might be it, but it was hard to tell because the pool in the photo appeared to be partially obscured by a rock overhang.

It took us about 3.5 hours to get to Candy Rock Road from Bass Lake, partially due to surprise road construction along 49 that required us to take a 30-minute detour. When we finally got to Candy Rock Road, we were hoping that it would be open this year (it was closed last year due to winter storm damage, and we had to park at the gate and walk in). We got half of what we were hoping for: the road was open down to a parking area near the Blue Streak trailhead, but the last 1.5 miles down to the Candy Rock parking area were still closed. The closure looked permanent, as there were two dirt mounds and several boulders placed across the road to prevent vehicles from passing. The road past that point was getting overgrown, so it looked like they were letting it go. This has apparently deterred people from visiting, as this reportedly used to be a crowded area before the road closure, but there were only three or four other cars there today (not complaining).

( Click here for the full trip report with pictures and videos )

So yeah, not a whole lot of new developments for Candy Rock/Blue Streak this time around. The pool just upstream of Candy Rock was nice and probably would have increased my opinion of Candy Rock if we had seen it last year, but we both still maintain that Blue Streak is pretty unbeatable as far as accessible swimming holes on this stretch of the North Fork Stanislaus River. Perhaps next time we will find the elusive pool further upstream from Candy Rock, but that’s probably not a project that would be worth undertaking if it cut into time that we could be spending at Blue Streak, so it might have to happen on a trip where we could dedicate two days to this stretch of the river.
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Update: We returned in 2019 and devoted a full day to exploring the river upstream of Candy Rock. Click here for the trip report.