Lava Hot Puddle??

August 8 - 10, 2006
I met Luke in May of 2006 in my rock climbing class and we hung out all summer long. My friend Toni was hanging out in Jackson Hole for the summer as a river guide (how lucky is she?). It had been a while since I had run the Snake River so I decided that it would be fun to get a group together and go have fun up there for a couple of days. Me, Luke, Lu, Kate and some other friends took off for Jackson in August 2006. We had a blast camping next to the interesting neighbors, getting our cooler taken away from us by the rangers for leaving it out, playing in Grand Teton National Park, and just relaxing. When we went down the river, it was so much fun because we were in the smaller boats and this made the white water even more crazy. It was a blast. I consider it a success since only one of the people from our boat got dumped into the river. After we got done with our fun on the river, we all went into town to have probably one of the best burgers I have ever eaten. If you are ever in Jackson Hole, you definitely need to go to Billy's. It is this little hole in the wall burger joint with probably only 15 seats at the most. You almost always have to wait to get a seat but the burger is well worth the wait.

One of my favorite things about this trip was after we were all full on burgers and fries, we drove to the outskirts of town in search of a "hot spring". It ended up being more of a "hot puddle" when we found it though. After driving all the way up this winding dirt road, we parked the cars and found our way down to the river. I was envisioning something like Lava Hot Springs where it is pretty easy to find the hot water. Yeah, definitely not the case here. First of all, we had to cross this freezing cold, fast moving river. It was right at the bottom of a pretty good size waterfall where we were crossing. We had to cross with our shoes off and in the middle of the night with no lights, we were dang lucky that it was a full moon that night. All of us made it across in one piece but we were all very surprised when we got to the other side! There was this little puddle of warm and occasionally hot water! Really, there was only room for 2, maybe 3 people at the most to sit in the warm water! Definitely no Lava Hot Springs!!