Hot Springs Canyon

Santa Barbara front country

Heading up to the old Hot Springs Club hotel site like quite a few other Friday evenings with the Sierra Club social hike. Al generally takes the road up and back, but I very much like the trail, especially when it is light and the water is flowing. I tend to mutiny and take the trail. It seems to have become official at some point because when they brought out the new signs, this one was marked with the rest. Today, there is one more sign added to the collection.

A huge sign has been added with a trail map on one side and history of human habitation on the other. The local area trails map is useful, but the area overview map with relief mountains is too cartoonish and incomplete to be useful. The history seems rather cartoonish too.

The creek does make a lovely sound as we wander upward. The poison oak is not too bad along here, it must be getting plenty of traffic. We stop by the little waterfall to watch the water cascade and the frogs swim. Judging by the sounds around us, they are very thick around the big pool at the bottom.

It is quite a pretty little waterfall.

Someone has cut yet another trail, this one crossing the creek and climbing to the road above. We continue on the older trail as it crosses the catway continuing up the creek. It passes below the old walls of the hotel to one spot of hot springs.

A debris dam makes another little waterfall.

A step of the old hotel dated 1922.

The hot spring above the hotel is now thick with bananas.

There is not much hot water to be found up in the creek now. It seems like a bit more than 50% is collected although 50% is supposed to be left. We head out over the lobby of the hotel long ago removed by fire and back down the road.

The view from the lobby, sort of.

©2017 Valerie Norton
Posted 1 May 2017