Bagby Hot springs

Sun setting on Mt. Hood, with the groomed Palmer slope/glacier in the middle beside the chairlift. As I mentioned, I spent the night in the parking lot of the base lodge, which was an interesting experience. I met some Portland guys also camping in the lot, which was great. We hung out and talked for awhile, and they gave me some good local tips (most importantly, you dont have to buy a $54 lift ticket if you just hike up once to the upper lift and only ride the upper lift, which is the best riding anyway. Nice). That night I doubled up my 2 sleeping bags for the first time... brr. And it's July, haha. I was woken up in the middle of the night a few times by all the commotion in the parking lot - climbers intending to summit the mountain often start their hike around 1AM so that they catch the best, safest snow conditions. Apparently they try for the summit around dawn, just as the snow starts to soften, and get down by mid-morning as things are starting to get slushy - its pretty hardcore.

That morning, I hiked up with the guys I met the night before and rode with them for a few hours. Snowboarding in the bright sunshine on July 4th - what a day. We toasted to the holiday while on the lift - a cool moment. One of them graciously took the picture of me riding the glacier in the last post. Also, in a continuing trend of people I meet and talk to along my way opening up about their own experiences on the road, the one guy I snowboarded with told me a wild story about how when he was 14 and living in Missouri with his mother, she put him on a greyhound bus alone with a box of cheese-its and $20 and sent him to Oregon to live with his father. It was a 3 day bus trip and he ran out of money the first day. But, he ended up connecting with another rider who had similar roots in Oregon, who then paid for his meals and helped him out the rest of the ride. Wild.

Bagby hot springs, deep in Mt. Hood national forest and difficult to find. A portland native told me that this was a must-see. So, with her directions and a bizzare mushroom-harvesting map with instructions in various obscure Asian languages that I found in a bin in front of the closed Ranger's station (the map, while containing these useless but amusing instructions, was the kind of intricately-detailed topographic map that you usually have to pay a good sum for, and I usually make do without), I found the springs.

Hot water, straight from the earth, piped through hollowed out logs to the bathhouses. Unlike hot springs I've seen before, these had no nasty sulfur smell.

... and here is one of the personal hot tubs. It was so relaxing after a long day of travel. This place is just there in the National forest, free and open to use.