Adventures of a swimming hole aficionado

Today, Cade and I went to some lesser known teacup swimming holes just above a lake in Eldorado National Forest. I'm keeping the location details vague on this one, because swimming holes and waterfalls in this area are prone to weekend crowds, but this spot has somehow managed to stay below the radar. It caught my attention when I saw it featured in some kayaking videos on YouTube. It looked to have many big slides and rock tubs, but all the videos were taken during torrential spring flows, and I couldn’t find any information on this place being used as a swimming hole spot or what it even looked like in summer flows. I figured the slides probably weren’t hospitable for butt-sliding, but it looked like there were probably several good swimming holes. I was mainly interested to check out a section called the Teacups, which is a series of small waterfalls spilling into deep-looking rock tubs. However, these are just above a 60-foot waterfall comprised of a steep series of cascades and tubs (boaters regard the upper and lower tiers of the waterfall as two separate rapids). Kayaking and waterfalling websites mentioned a use trail leading to the main waterfall, but they didn’t specify if it continued upstream to the Teacups. I assumed the waterfall was surmountable, as several kayaking videos showed spotters standing on the sloped bedrock slab next to it, so I was confident enough to take a chance on exploring this area. I also figured it would be a good place for a Saturday excursion, since this spot seemed fairly unknown to anyone other than kayakers.

Another thing I was slightly concerned about was whether the creek flowed year-round or dried up in late summer. Google Earth imagery from different years seemed to indicate that it rarely goes completely dry, but it appeared to be only a trickle in drier years with less snowfall. However, I wasn’t too worried about it since this had been a record snowfall year. According to Dreamflows, the creek was flowing at ~14 cfs today.

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

In summary, I ended up enjoying this spot more than I thought I would. It had crystal clear water and many sculpted rock pools to explore. It kind of reminded me of Rock Creek, although the surrounding scenery was not quite as striking. It didn’t have any major slides (at least not that would be slidable without a kayak), but it did have some potential low jumps that might be possible with a precision landing. I should note that I didn’t thoroughly explore the pools downstream of the main waterfall, so I can’t say for sure that there aren’t any serviceable jumps or slides there. The water temperature today was 61°F, but it felt a little warmer less freezing than that (maybe 64-ish). The air temperature was in the upper 70s, but the teacups got sun exposure all day, which made the warm rock slabs an ideal place to bask after a brisk swim. Perhaps the temperature is warmer in drier years, when the flow is probably much lower in late summer.

Today, Cade and I kicked off our fifth California swimming hole marathon by hiking to Chilnualna Falls in Yosemite National Park. This creek was one of the first swimming hole spots I had put on my list when researching our first trip back in 2017, but we didn’t end up making it to Yosemite that year or on any of our other trips for one reason or another. The closest we came was in 2018, but they closed the park due to the Ferguson Fire three days before we arrived, and we couldn’t get out of our vacation rental, so we ended up having to resort to smoky backup plans outside the park. This time, we booked hotels with flexible cancellation policies, as you never know what’s going to happen in California, but I’ll admit that a tropical storm is the last thing I would have expected. The original plan was to do Chilnualna yesterday and do the touristy stuff in Yosemite Valley today, but yesterday's forecast called for scattered showers and a high of 68 °F with the remnants of Hurricane Hilary passing through, so we swapped the days and did the valley yesterday. We were hoping the weather would be better today, since this was our last day staying in Oakhurst (near the southern entrance of the park in Wawona, where Chilnualna Creek is), but it was still partly cloudy and in the low 70’s.

Chilnualna Creek boasts two sections of interest. The lower section near the trailhead features two swimming holes known as The Ledge and Honeymooners, and a short distance upstream from those (as the crow flies) is the Big Pot. I had marked another point of interest on Google Earth about a quarter mile upstream of the Big Pot, but it looked like it might be in the middle of a waterfall, so I was unsure if it would be accessible. The upper section of interest is Chilnualna Falls, which is a three-tiered waterfall about five miles up the trail. The uppermost tier features a large swimming hole at its base, and several teacup cascades above the main drop. It was unclear from pictures if the teacups were accessible, as the terrain around them looked pretty steep depending on the angle, but I was interested to find out. I knew we probably wouldn’t be able to hit all the swimming hole highlights of the creek in one day, so my main objective for today was to check out Chilnualna Falls. This meant we would probably have to come back another time to see everything on the lower section, but I still wanted to check out the Big Pot, as it had been the swimming hole that initially piqued my interest for this creek.

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

In summary, Chilnualna Creek would be a great swimming hole destination in hot, perpetually sunny weather. Today’s hike offered some great views, but the cool, overcast weather made it disappointing and uninviting from a swimming hole standpoint. The increased flow and freezing cold water did not help. Chilnualna Falls was swimmable, but the creek picked up a few more tributary streams between there and the lower swimming holes, making the Big Pot a little too rough. Even though I didn’t really get into any of the pools today (other than the base of upper Chilnualna Falls for a few seconds), I’m thinking the best swimming hole would be the uppermost significant tub above Chilnualna Falls. It was large in diameter, appeared deep, and had a perfect rock diving board (if the water under it is deep, which I didn’t check). I would like to revisit Chilnualna Creek in a more typical year, so I can do a proper exploration of the Big Pot, and also check out The Ledge and Honeymooners. Even though hiking all the way to Chilnualna Falls is kind of a drag, the payoff would be worth the effort in nicer weather, so I would consider going back up there again as well.

For day four of our trip, Cade and I returned to the Emerald Pools on the South Yuba River to do a proper exploration. We had briefly stopped here on the way back from Island Lake on our 2017 trip, but we didn’t get to Emerald Pools until 6 PM after the sun had set. The water was 54 °F that day, which was in no way going to be pleasant for swimming. The main reason I had been wanting to get back to Emerald Pools is that I discovered it was the location of a mystery swimming hole I had seen in a YouTube video prior to our first trip in 2017. The video features two swimming holes, one of which I recognized as God’s Bath. The second swimming hole looked really enticing – clear blue water, a side waterfall spilling in, and numerous ledges for jumping, but I could not for the life of me figure out where it was. I spent hours (okay, weeks) on Google Earth scanning pretty much every major California river I could think of to no avail. Finally, after our 2018 trip, the uploader revealed the location as Emerald Pools. With that massive clue, I was easily able to find the mystery pool on Google Earth, but I never would have guessed I had been so close to it. I suppose the main spots, known as the Lower Emerald Pools (where the jumpers go) and the Upper Emerald Pools (where families go), had distracted me from the lesser-known pools on that stretch of the river.

I had planned to tie up this loose end during our 2019 trip, but we ended up blowing it off that year because we had hit a string of unpleasantly cold swimming holes, and we knew the Emerald Pools were not going to improve that situation. The pools are only about a mile downstream from the Lake Spaulding dam, which means the water is cold year-round since it doesn't have much time to warm up after being released from the bottom of the lake. On top of that, both 2017 and 2019 were record snowfall years where the rivers were colder than normal. However, 2021 has been the opposite (record low snowfall and warmer water than normal), plus the area is currently under an excessive heat warning, so I figured if there was ever a year Emerald Pools would have a tolerable water temperature, this would be it.

We had originally planned to revisit Royal Gorge today (which entails a strenuous 7 mile round trip hike) since it’s a Sunday and Emerald Pools is highly popular, but yesterday’s hike kind of destroyed Cade, so we decided to swap the days and just deal with the weekend crowds since the hike to Emerald Pools is less than a mile (although it does entail some minor rock climbing).

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

In summary, Emerald Pools is a great cliff jumping spot, so it’s no surprise that it’s one of the most popular spots in northern California. The cliff walls are so textured that there is a jump from pretty much any height you could want up to 70-ish feet. However, I wouldn’t really call it a great swimming hole per se because the water is too cold for a swim to be enjoyable. Even at today’s unusually “warm” water temperatures, it was really only tolerable for jumping in and quickly getting out. The water also wasn’t very emerald-y today due to all the brown filth swirling around, but I suppose that’s the price one pays for the water temperature not being in the 50’s. I would likely hit up the Emerald Pools from time to time if I were a local, but it’s probably not a place I would return to when visiting from out of state unless I were with someone who wanted to go. If I did go back, I would like to explore the rest of the box canyon downstream of the mystery pool (I guess I can stop calling it that, now that it’s no longer a mystery).

A montage of my swimming hole exploits from 2017-2019:

For the third day of our 2019 California swimming hole marathon, Cade and I went to Seven Falls on one of the many branches of the forks of the Feather River near, well, nothing. I guess as the crow flies it was sort of near Oroville. Seven Falls was originally supposed to be day 5 of our first California swimming hole marathon in 2017, but the road was closed, so we ended up doing Curtain Falls as a backup plan, and we didn’t make it this far north in 2018, so we had to wait until this year for retribution. I was interested to see how Seven Falls stacked up to Curtain Falls, since I wasn’t a huge fan of the Curtain Falls experience (although Cade enjoyed the hike and the scenery of Bald Rock Dome). We actually saw Bald Rock Dome from a distance while driving out to Seven Falls today.

The drive from Chico was two hours. I had originally planned to stay in Oroville to shave 30 minutes off the drive, but we couldn’t find any reasonably priced accommodations there on short notice. The latter half of the trip was an hour of driving on twenty miles worth of desolate forest service roads. The road was actually paved for all but the last two miles, although it was a one-lane blacktop road with no lines and a healthy serving of potholes. The area was also heavily forested with large evergreens. The last two miles on the dirt road were pretty rough. It started off alright, but we quickly got to the deep ruts and rocks sticking up. We were able to navigate the obstacles in Cade’s medium-clearance SUV until we had about 0.3 miles to go and encountered some rocks sticking up that Cade didn’t want to attempt driving over. We parked and walked the rest of the way to the trailhead. We were surprised to see another vehicle parked there.

The trail down to the falls dropped around 1000 feet over about a mile, and it wasted no time with switchbacks. It was more or less a straight shot down the hill. I was trying to go as slow as I could without gaining so much forward momentum that I couldn’t stop, because there were a lot of steep slopes that one could fall down if they started sliding uncontrollably, which could happen easily given that the trail consisted of loose dust, and the rocks were all covered with loose pebbles and leaves. After a scramble that probably added ten years of age to my knees, we emerged at the river just downstream of the fourth waterfall.

Before I continue, I guess I should establish the layout of Seven Falls. The final five waterfalls are large and obvious, but there are several smaller falls upstream of the lower five, and it is unclear which two of them are considered part of the seven. I will refer to the falls in order from upstream to downstream. In other words, Fall 1 is the top waterfall, and Fall 7 is the bottom one.

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

In summary, I thought Seven Falls was a pretty good swimming hole destination. I had been curious about how it would compare to Curtain Falls, since we did that as a backup plan in place of Seven Falls on our first trip. I liked Seven Falls better from a swimming hole standpoint, even though Curtain Falls was about ten degrees warmer, but Cade said he liked the admittedly more scenic hike to Bald Rock Canyon and Curtain Falls better. My only complaint about Seven Falls was the cold water, especially since we seem to be having a streak of annoyingly cold swimming holes on this trip when we would really like to find some with more moderate temperatures. Other than that, though, Seven Falls has pretty much everything a swimming hole aficionado could want: sparkling crystal clear water, multiple large pools and waterfalls to explore, plenty of places to climb and jump from, and warm flat rocks to lie on after a cold swim. I don't know if it quite beats Royal Gorge (Seven Falls has better waterfalls and bigger pools, but the setting was not quite as epic as Royal Gorge, and the jumping opportunities were not as good), but if I were making a Top 5 list of California swimming holes, Seven Falls would certainly be on it. I would definitely be up for returning sometime and exploring the falls further. I would love to get better views of the bottom three waterfalls, and I know there were more cascades and pools than what we saw today, especially upstream of Fall 2.

Today, Cade and I kicked off our third annual California swimming hole marathon. The first two times, my excuse for going to California was that I couldn’t do my Tennessee swimming hole marathon because of the weather. This year, the Tennessee trip worked out, but I came to California anyway, because screw it, I love me some California swimming holes. I thought I might be burnt out from traveling at this point, given that I had only a week of downtime between getting back from Tennessee and leaving for California, but as soon as I got back to work Monday, I was ready for another vacation. I was burnt out from work due to all the overtime I worked over the winter, so I figured this month I would use the comp time I earned to do some swimming hole overtime.

For this trip, I didn’t really feel like doing a lot of researching, and Cade generally prefers to leave the trip planning to me, so I whipped up an itinerary of loose ends and places we didn’t get to on our first trip back in 2017. We also had some loose ends from last year’s trip since our plan to go to Yosemite was foiled by the wildfires, which we plan to remedy at some point, but this time I wanted to focus on the area between Sonora and Chico, as most of our favorite swimming holes thus far have been concentrated in that area. Cade had also expressed a desire to go further north than we had before, and I did have a few places I wanted to check out near Redding and Mt. Shasta, so we decided to start there and work our way south to the Sonora area so that we could save Blue Streak, our favorite California swimming hole thus far, for the finale.

I flew into Sacramento yesterday and met up with Cade. My layover was in Las Vegas, and a fair amount of people were intoxicated on my second flight from Las Vegas to Sacramento. When the flight attendants were trying to give their pre-flight spiel about the safety features of the aircraft, half the people were cutting up like a class of high school freshmen, and someone just got up and went to the bathroom while we were taxiing. I guess that's Vegas on a Saturday.

Anyway, after I got into Sacramento, Cade and I drove to Redding and checked into the Super 8 motel. Our room looked like it had been renovated a few years ago but has become a little beaten up since then. It was also super stuffy inside, despite being hot and dry outside. We got dinner at the Olive Garden, which was also stuffy and musty inside, and I left with garlic burps from their breadsticks.
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Today, we started things off by going to McCloud Falls on the McCloud River near Mt. Shasta. This place looked nice but not super spectacular from an aesthetic standpoint, but it looked like a good place for jumping. It has a lower, middle, and upper falls. The lower falls has some lower jumping opportunities around 10-15 feet, and the middle falls has some bigger jumps of about 25 feet and higher. Timothy Joyce rates the water temperature as moderate in his Swimming Holes of California book, so I figured it would be a fun water playground. We were also going to be passing through the town of Mount Shasta, which has a canyon called Box Canyon that was featured in a Rescue 911 episode, so I wanted to check that out even though I didn't know of any swimming opportunities there.

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

In summary, I was pretty disappointed with McCloud Falls from a swimming hole standpoint, because the water was way too cold for swimming to be pleasant. I could have done the jump in, jump out thing if I had been able to scope out the depth at potential jumping spots, but the water was so unpleasant that I couldn’t even bring myself to do that. Plus, half the fun of jumping is the refreshing plunge into water on a hot day, but it’s not very fun when the water feels like needles. I think it’s idiotic to jump into water without depth-checking it first, but I can see why people would just want to jump into water like this, as there's really no easing in when the water is this cold (not that that makes skipping depth-checking excusable). I’m hoping this ice water problem was just a McCloud Falls thing and isn’t going to plague us for the whole trip. Our first trip in 2017 was also during a high snowmelt year, and we got mostly moderate water temperatures then, so I’m hoping the waters get warmer as we move farther south.

After doing some research online and buying Timothy Joyce’s Swimming Holes of California book last year, I discovered a few more points of interest along the creek that seemed worth checking out. On the itinerary for today (in order from downstream to upstream) were Angel Falls (the location of the Rescue 911 segment), a series of potholes referred to as the Washing Machine and Dryer in Tim’s book, Willow Creek Falls, and an unnamed swimming hole upstream of Willow Creek Falls. There is also a waterfall called Devil’s Slide downstream of Willow Creek Falls that I wanted to look at, but I didn’t anticipate there being any good swimming opportunities here.

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

In summary, Willow Creek is a great swimming hole location with several worthwhile spots. The pool at Devil’s Slide was easily the winner (it kind of reminded me of a combination of Screaming Right Hand Turn Falls on Steels Creek and the upper pool at Harper Creek Falls back in North Carolina). In fact, the whole creek reminded me a lot of streams in the North Carolina mountains, namely Upper Creek and Steels Creek (albeit with a more generous serving of potholes). If you had just plopped me down and told me I was in North Carolina, I would have believed it. Angel Falls was my second favorite, although I found it to be a bit treacherous. Although Willow Creek kind of lacked that California grandeur found at some of the places we visited last year, its clear water and numerous slides, potholes, and rock pools should make it a fun playground for swimming hole enthusiasts and casual hikers alike.

For the seventh and final day of our California swimming hole marathon, Cade and I went to Candy Rock and Blue Streak, two swimming holes about a mile apart on the North Fork Stanislaus River near Sonora, CA. When I first saw videos of Candy Rock, I thought it looked pretty sweet (pun sort of intended). It had been at the top of my list of swimming holes to visit in California, but I wasn’t sure if we were going to get to go when I was planning the trip because I had heard that the road was closed and the river was high. However, Cade went and checked it out about three weeks ago and said the road was still open to foot traffic; it would just add an extra 2.5 miles to the hike. Candy Rock is apparently a pretty popular and well-known spot, so I was hoping the extra hike combined with the fact that it was a Friday would deter the crowds. Cade said that he thought Candy Rock was a bit overhyped, but he had not checked out Blue Streak when he first visited, so that was his main objective for the day. I had initially thought Candy Rock would be the highlight, but given that Lemke’s Lagoon on the South Yuba River had been our favorite swimming hole so far, we now both had higher hopes for Blue Streak, since Blue Streak looked to be more similar to Lemke’s Lagoon than Candy Rock.

There were no other cars there when we got to the parking area where the road was gated off. A sign on the gate said that the road was open to foot traffic, horses (I think), and bicycles. It said that the hike to Candy Rock was 2.5 miles. The road started off along the rim of a gorge about 600 feet deep.

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

In summary, I would say Blue Streak turned out to be the highlight of today’s excursion, as expected. It seems to get less attention than Candy Rock, not because it sucks, but because it is more difficult to access. Candy Rock was okay, but I would have to agree with Cade that it is a bit overhyped. I think it gets glorified on social media because it’s low-hanging fruit (or at least it was before the road was closed), being only a short hike from the parking area. Also, Candy Rock is a bit more interesting from a geological standpoint, which makes it more visually attractive. If we had been able to drive all the way to it, then I might have thought more highly of it (although it probably would have been crowded), but I’m not sure I’d say it’s worth a three-mile hike. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a worthy daytrip destination if you live within driving distance, but I don’t think Candy Rock is really worth flying across the country on its own merit. Luckily, Candy Rock has Blue Streak to back it up, so it’s still worth visiting if you combine the two into a package deal and consider Candy Rock as an appetizer before the main course (i.e., Blue Streak). It would take a pretty tough crowd of swimming hole goers to find Blue Streak disappointing. Blue Streak had pretty much everything one could want in a swimming hole, although it didn’t quite stack up to the South Yuba River on account of the dark water. If Blue Streak had water like the Yuba, then it easily would have been the number one swimming hole of the trip.
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As I said in my first entry of this trip, the main reason I chose California for this year’s swimming hole vacation was the weather, and it was pretty reliably warm and dry everywhere we went. Some of the swimming holes were a bit chilly, but most had sun-heated rocks to warm up on. I’m not sure how I would say that California swimming holes compare to southeastern swimming holes, as both sides have some pretty good ones, but I think California definitely wins the favorable weather award. On this trip, we mostly focused on the area north of Yosemite to just north of Lake Tahoe. We cleared all but one of the swimming holes in that region that I really wanted to see (the loose end being Seven Falls in the Feather River basin). Two things we sort of missed out on for this trip were a good natural water slide and some good pothole-style swimming holes. Curtain Falls sort of had a sliding waterfall, but the flow was a bit high to go down all the way from the top on the day we visited. God’s Bath and Candy Rock were sort of pothole/tub style pools, but I was hoping more for the exquisite teacup-style potholes like those found at Steels Creek Falls in North Carolina. When I was researching California swimming holes, it looked like most of the good slides and teacups were in the Yosemite and Sequoia areas. We had originally planned to spend a couple of days in Yosemite on this trip, but we ended up blowing it off due to no budget-friendly accommodations being available on short notice. I plan to concentrate my efforts in Yosemite and Sequoia on my next swimming-hole-centric trip to California. Cade also has a thing for Big Sur, so it’s possible we could make an appearance there. Big Sur has some gorgeous but obscure Hawaiian-looking swimming holes, so it’s possible I could be enticed to go there if I can find one that doesn’t involve a backpacking trip (or, by some unexpected twist, I get into backpacking).

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

Now that we have reached the end of this year’s trip, I will say that I consider it a much bigger success than last year’s trip to Georgia. That time, five out of six of our excursions were unsatisfactory (in my opinion) due to rain-swollen rivers and/or the swimming holes being subpar. We hit swimming holes for seven days in a row this year, and I would say at least five of those excursions were satisfactory or better. Some of the places we went had an abundance of great jumping opportunities, which allowed me to improve my jumping confidence, which has waned over the past decade. Also, I think my trekking poles really helped this year. I used them on almost every hike, and my knees are not sore at all (as opposed to last year when they were angry for months after the trip).

Well, I guess that about wraps things up for this adventure. I may end up hitting another Appalachian swimming hole or two before the end of the summer, and I have plans to go to Havasupai soon, so I’m hoping this continues to be a productive swimming hole year despite the slow start.

Today, Cade and I went to a lesser-known swimming hole on the North Fork American River. I learned of this one from a cliff jumping video on youtube, but the person who posted the video did not reveal the exact whereabouts or name of the waterfall, so I had to do a fair amount of search-engine detective work and scanning of Google Earth to pinpoint the location. And finding the location on a map per se was only half the battle; once I found it, I then had to figure out how to get there. There were enough clues and tidbits of information scattered about in various corners of the internet, but finding them and compiling them into something usable was sort of like a swimming hole treasure hunt. It seems that people who glorify this area as a swimming hole and/or cliff jumping spot want to keep the location a secret, so I will follow suit and only use vague location references. This place had sort of gone into the ‘maybe pile’ when I was researching California swimming holes, but Cade said the he wanted to go, so we ended up deciding to do it. I had initially dismissed it as a possibility for this trip when I first discovered it, because the only information I could find about accessing it said that it was accessible via a long hike down into Royal Gorge (reports of the trail length varied from 6-9 miles one way depending on the source), and I was only looking for swimming holes that could be done as day trips. However, when scanning Google Earth, I saw bits and pieces of what looked like a possible shortcut trail (and by “shortcut”, I mean 3 miles instead of 9). On the satellite imagery, the maybe-trail disappears into the forest a few times and re-emerges, and it was unclear whether the trail segments I was seeing were actually connected. I did manage to find one blog entry that seemed to confirm the existence of a shortcut trail in that same vicinity, but the blogger didn’t provide any information on the exact whereabouts of the trailhead. I decided to take a chance and assume that the trail I could see on Google Earth was the same one the blogger had mentioned.

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

In summary, the section of the North Fork American River we explored today has an amazing set of swimming holes. I found out afterwards that this area is part of the National Wild and Scenic River system, and it’s easy to see why. The scenery is gorgeous, and I have yet to see a place with a more ideal jumping setup. I would say that the only thing that keeps this place from being a perfect 10 is the water temperature, but other than that, it basically looks like an island paradise hidden away in a rugged Sierra wilderness. I would say that today’s swimming holes have easily been my favorite so far, and this is the type of place I came to California to experience. Despite the difficulty of access, I would say the whole ordeal was very worth it (if Cade doesn’t end up experiencing subsequent car trouble due to the rough roads). That said, there is no way in HELL either of us would ever come back here with anything less than a high-clearance, four wheel drive vehicle. I definitely see paved roads in store for tomorrow’s outing.

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.