Hot Soaks Amidst Cold Snow

One of my goals for this year was to go to 30+ new hot springs in order to complete my 3-year goal of soaking in 100 hot springs in Idaho. As we went to Kanyon's weekend wrestling meets in the winter months, we took advantage of any opportunity to soak in different hot springs nearby (like when we stayed at Lolo Hot Springs in December after his tournament in Corvallis), and we were able to cross off two more new hot springs in Idaho in January and February, as well as return to some we've been to before.

We stayed in a cute cabin at Thousand Springs Hot Springs Resort the weekend Kanyon competed at the Wendell tournament. This was our first time at this resort. There's a large campground and several cabins surrounding the indoor pools. The big indoor warm pool had different activities like a slide, shallow wading pool, basketball hoop, and water sprinkled from the ceiling. There's also a long hallway in the facility full of rooms with small hot soaking tubs that you can rent out individually. Our cabin was right along the Snake River, with a view of some of the Thousand Springs waterfalls across the river. There was a scout troop that was camped right by our cabin, which surprised us since it was the middle of January! We rented a hot soaking tub room all to ourselves on Friday evening, and it was quite lovely. We enjoyed our experience at Thousand Springs Hot Springs! 

We had one free weekend in January that Kanyon didn't have a wrestling tournament, so Josh and I decided to spend it at Jackson Hot Springs in Montana. We'd soaked there before, but we'd never stayed there. We booked a small cabin room, and had such a relaxing time. We enjoyed eating dinner there, soaking in the large outdoor hot pool multiple times, and reading books in our cabin room. We didn't know it when we made reservations, but there were several people from Salmon who stayed there the same weekend as us, and we kept spotting them in the lodge and in the pool, which was a fun surprise. 

I like that their Christmas tree was still up in the lodge!
This was the view from our dinner table.

Soaking Friday night under the steamy lights.

Soaking Saturday morning

Apparently Lewis and Clark soaked in this same hot spring
on their return trip from the Pacific Coast!

On the last weekend of January, Kanyon had a wrestling tournament in Kooskia, Montana. It's a 5-hour drive over Lolo Pass to get there, so on our return trip home, we broke up the drive by stopping at Jerry Johnson Hot Springs. We'd been there before, but only soaked in the small pools by the river on our first time there. We heard there was a larger pool beyond those small soaker pools, so we'd been looking forward to returning to that location to check it out. This was the perfect opportunity to do just that, and it turned out to be a perfect winter day to soak! The sun was shining, the snow reflecting in the light was beautiful, the mile-long hike in the snow was matted down from previous hikers, and our timing was good because we had the pool to ourselves for about a half hour before a family and a group of young adults showed up. We'd never soaked there in the winter before, but we absolutely loved it! 

On the second weekend in February, Josh and I went down to Preston, Idaho to pick up Kanyon's birthday present. We made a weekend trip of it, staying at a hotel in Pocatello and stopping on the drive to Preston to soak in the natural "Chicken Soup Hot Springs" in the Portneuf River in Lava Hot Springs. It was a short walk through the snow to reach the natural hot springs, which was easier than I expected. The trickiest part was walking down the steep side of the hill amidst the ice, snow, and mud to reach the soaking pools in the river. The river was freezing, with ice chunks flowing by, and in contrast, several of the spots in the soaking pools were boiling hot! However, we found a nice area to soak that was comfortable for about 25 minutes. When we started to get out, a group of guys showed up, and they took turns cold plunging in the river and laying in the hot pools, which was hilarious to see. 

Our favorite natural hot springs is Cronk's Canyon Hot Springs, about 45 minutes from our home, along Highway 93 South. We hadn't been there for a while, so on the last Saturday of February, we decided to go for a drive to soak in the small soaking pool along the Salmon River. We had it all to ourselves, and stayed for about an hour, soaking in the hot pool, listening to the river, and relaxing in the rocky canyon.