Adventures of a swimming hole aficionado

My summer this year has been sorely lacking in swimming holes thus far due to a combination of wet weather in the east (what else is new) and some sort of cryptic stomach condition that has been plaguing me since early June. My solution for the former problem was to head back out to California, where there are swimming holes aplenty and the weather is reliably hot and dry. However, the stomach problem was diminishing my appetite and making me feel fatigued and nauseous, especially when doing physically demanding things, so I wasn’t sure about my ability to travel, much less do strenuous hikes in the heat. After it became obvious that staying at home and taking it easy was not leading to any improvements, I decided to go ahead and salvage what was left of my summer and just eat Tums and Pepto as needed. I coordinated with Cade, my usual travel buddy for swimming hole centric vacations, and we planned our trip around the dates that we were able to get accommodations near Yosemite, as we had wanted to do some things in that area last year but waited too long to book, and we weren’t able to find anything affordable on short notice. This year, a wildfire (the Ferguson Fire) broke out on July 13, three days after we made our reservation, and is now threatening the park. We won’t be heading to Yosemite until tomorrow, though, since we are starting off in the Sequoia area and working our way north. I flew into San Francisco yesterday afternoon, and Cade picked me up and we headed out to the Comfort Suites in Tulare. We didn’t get here until midnight, as both my flights were delayed, causing us to get stuck in Bay Area rush hour traffic.

For our first day of this year’s swimming hole marathon, we drove out past Springville, California to check out some swimming holes on the Middle Fork Tule River. I had put this pretty high on my list when I was coming up with swimming holes for last year’s trip, but the area was closed due to high water from the record snowfall that winter. The canyon was now open, which meant we were free to check it out. I had marked two spots that I definitely wanted to visit (we’ll call one of them Middle Fork Tule River Falls and the other the Wishon Tule Slide), and I scanned the area on Google Earth and marked a couple of other spots that might be worth investigating. On the drive up, the visibility of the mountains was noticeably poorer than usual due to the smoke haze. We drove upriver through the canyon until the river split into the South Middle Fork Tule River and the North Middle Fork (also known as the Wishon Fork). The first place we stopped at was one of the points of interest I had marked on the South Middle Fork. On Google Earth, the river looks pretty close to the road (which it is in a purely horizontal sense), but we ended up having to scramble a couple hundred feet down the hill (which was basically loose, black dirt with no vegetation; it looked like there had been a fire recently) to get even a partial view. I opted to go straight down the hill until I was adjacent to the point of interest.

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

In summary, today’s excursion was mostly disappointing due to all of the swimming holes being filled with sediment to the point where most were too shallow for jumping or even actual swimming, and I was kind of frustrated that we didn't find the guy's lost GoPro, even though it wasn't mine. On top of that, the South Middle Fork Tule River was kind of scummy-looking. The Wishon Fork looked cleaner and almost looked like a miniature South Yuba River in some areas, but without the large swimming holes to match. Also, there was quite a bit of litter, broken glass, and graffiti in the area. It will probably be a while before all the sediment washes out of the pools, but when it does, the area will hopefully be restored to what I am assuming would be its regular state of awesomeness. If those pools were deeper, as they must have been in previous years, then I probably would have had much nicer things to say about the area. I may have to return in a few years for retribution, but only after I see recent videos on social media confirming that the swimming holes are back in working order.