Naked ladies in the woods...
Bit o’ braggin’ follows….
Ever since @Reverendhornibastad wrote about his adventures with Yuni at a mountain hot springs in SE Asia, I’ve been yearning more than normally to get to the great mountain hot springs an hour+ east of here in the Willamette national forest. It has been closed much of the last couple years, 1st by a massive land slide couple of winters ago that closed the road until it could be rebuilt. A couple weeks after that (in summer 2018) one of the bigger fires here in Oregon started basically at the hot springs, raged for weeks. Only a month or two ago was the road, trail, and hot springs opened to public.
With recent early rains the chanterelle mushrooms are up early, wife says let’s go pick some. Sure, I say, and if we go to ‘secret mushroom hunting spot A’, we can stop at hot springs on the way back. Plan on. Mushroom baskets filled fast in the drizzle and dripping forest, time to warm up. Paid our admission, cheerful lady at ticket stand shares that “top pool is 107*, bottom pool is 97”.
Hiking in it looks very different, everything is burnt, some trees still live, many don’t. Undergrowth is sprouting, greening up, but it’s a different – stark – beauty, different than the lush, mixed, old growth scene it was. But beauty remains.
Coming over the last hill, we see the covered deck/changing area somehow survived, and the springs themselves look fine, can’t burn rock and water. My wife and I strip down, stuff our clothes in a pack and join the couple dozen people there. There are five pools, top one hottest of course, 107* spring water flowing out of a boarded up (cause it partially collapsed some years ago) cave. Naked (and some not, it is optional) happy people in each pool; we start with 3rd one, cause it’s the least crowded and the deepest, about chest deep.
Hot springing isn’t like strip clubbing, anyone can play, beautiful or not. But this visit, most of the ladies are…amazingly beautiful. I think that – relaxed, naked, happy people look good. And… objectively, on this visit, over half of the dozen+ women there are stunning, (the 20s and 30s). The couple women that are probably 40-something look great, and my wife and the British Columbia couple doing a hot springs vacation (this was their 4th hot spring in a week or so), show that, even in their 60s, people look good.
A hi-lite is watching a gorgeous, wet lass climb out of the water, step over to the little stream cascading down the hill, gather cold water in a 5-gallon bucket and pour it over her perfect body. Gives me goose bumps just remembering that.
It was wonderful, great to be back to ‘one of our homes’ in the woods. I’ve been going here over 40 years, much has changed over time, but this remains one of the great spots to be. Lucky, me.
