Guffey Gorge

Yesterday, Cade and I finished this year’s California swimming hole marathon by re-visiting our favorite swimming hole from last year: Lemke’s Lagoon on the South Yuba River. I don’t have any new pictures or anything new to report for that one, other than that the water was warmer than last year (79 °F this year compared to 74 °F last year), and the bottom of the river had a lot of silt and algae on it. The water was still clear, but it appeared darker and less blue than last year. The hike there was ridiculously hot (I think it was 100 °F outside or close to it), so we stayed at the swimming hole until late afternoon. The sand next to the river was blisteringly hot at 145 °F, and the rocks ranged from 115-130 °F. We spent a while jumping and snorkeling around in the pool. On the way back, we stopped at Hoyt’s Crossing, which I took pictures of but didn’t actually get into last year. I snorkeled the pool this time, and it was 8-10 feet deep in most areas. There were several people skinny-dipping, but I didn’t drop trou because only women were doing it at first, and I didn’t want to be the only naked guy. A few guys went skinny-dipping after I had gotten in, but my bathing suit was already wet at that point, so there was no point in taking it off now. After I was done swimming, we drove back to where Cade and his roommate live in the Bay Area, and we got donuts and Outback on the way.

We had to end our trip today because Cade wasn’t able to get off work tomorrow, but I had a couple more vacation days, and my friend Brook from Denver happened to be off work today, so I decided to take a detour to Denver on my way back to Raleigh. We were trying to decide what to do beforehand, and Brook suggested I find a swimming hole within reasonable distance of the city. From what I could gather, Colorado is not exactly bursting at the seams with swimming holes, but I had marked a few on my swimming hole list. The closest one I could come up with (aside from flat spots on rivers) was Guffey Gorge, also known as Paradise Cove, a little over two hours south of Denver. Brook picked me up from the airport, we had lunch, and then we headed out to the swimming hole. Traffic was pretty congested most of the way, so it ended up taking us closer to three hours to get there. Temperatures were near the 90s in the city, but they dropped to the high 70s/low 80s when we got to Guffey. The visibility of the mountains had also been bad, as with California, although it was unclear if this was also due to smoke.

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

In summary, Guffey Gorge was kind of a disappointment to see in person (granted, I have been up since 4 AM today, so I may be a tough crowd). It’s one of those places that looks bigger and more impressive in pictures. On top of that, there were too many people there, and this was relatively sparse compared to the crowds this place sometimes gets. The result is that it’s a small swimming hole that you jump into and then exit to get out of the next jumper’s way. It’s one of those places that might be a cool little hideaway if it were secret and no one knew about it, but its redeeming qualities kind of collapse under the weight of its popularity.

( Click here to see my ranking for the swimming holes I visited on this trip )

Well, I guess that’s it for this year’s west-coast swimming hole exploits. It sucked that the wildfires foiled some of our plans, but the silver lining was that we got to see a couple of cool places that we probably would have skipped had the main attractions been open. We will probably make another attempt at Yosemite next time, and there are a still a few new places I want to check out in the Chico area, but we also might spend a greater portion of our next trip doing a more thorough exploration of rivers we know deliver the goods (namely the South Yuba, North Fork Stanislaus, and North Fork American Rivers) rather than check out new places. My stomach issues that I mentioned in my first entry were pretty tenuous during the trip and didn’t really interfere with my traveling ability or my enjoyment of the swimming holes.

Now that I’ll be back in the east for the rest of summer, I might hit some swimming holes in the Cumberland Plateau area of Tennessee (as I intended to do last year) within the next month if the weather cooperates. Stay tuned.