Sean Patrick Hill

Introduction to the forthcoming book

Christmas Day, 1997. I awake at dawn, the morning after my 27th birthday, in a nest of afghans in the back of a vintage white 1973 Volkswagen van, parked at a turnout on the edge of the primitive Deer Creek Road, just before it disappears around a bend into the thick conifer forest of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Beneath the blankets, the simple bed is warm with body heat. Outside, the temperature is well below freezing. The sun slowly rises over a snow-and-ice-sheeted dirt road that crosses a bridge over the McKenzie River and ascends a gradual slope to the edge of Highway 126, which parallels the river from its genesis in the lava flows beneath Mt. Washington to its confluence with the Willamette River. Even behind the closed windows, I could hear the steady rush of the river and see the white alders bent under the weight of the cold.

I get out of the vehicle wearing long underwear, a thick wool sweater, corduroy pants, a scarf, and a jean jacket lined with fleece. I look around, absorbing the full spectrum of this place. Douglas-fir and Western red-cedar tower above the road, climbing the steep mountains above the river. The sky is a clear, pale blue, where the last-quarter moon resembles a scythe slicing through the sky, or a sail without a mast. The McKenzie River Trail, a 27-mile National Recreation Trail and one of the finest in Oregon, crosses the Deer Creek Road near the parking area, and parallels the river past a series of waterfalls and springs, canyons and lava fields, from its source at Clear Lake to the ranger station near the town of McKenzie Bridge. I carry a towel toward this trail.

At the foot of the bridge a small user trail, what the locals call a fisherman’s path, slips along the bridgehead toward the river, following it downstream along the bank. There is a ring of stones, a fire pit, on the shore; of course, this would be an excellent place to camp if this area wasn’t designated by the U.S. Forest Service as “day-use only,” meaning the time from dawn to dusk. The reason anyone would want to camp here is at the end of this trail, where the shore narrows and finally disappears in the shadow of the cliff: a maidenhair fern-draped grotto where Bigelow Hot Springs, also called Deer Creek after the nearby stream, emerges from a shallow cave and pools behind a low wall of mud and river rock that people build and maintain to hold the hot water back from the perpetually-cold river. This morning, I undress quickly and slide in, determined to live out this simple dream: to lie in a steaming pool of water in the midst of a Cascade Mountains winter.

The water comes as a shock: on a winter day, the pool is not exactly a hot spring, but rather a warm spring; that is, my “soak” is not going to rise above a tepid bath, just enough warmth to maintain an uneasy comfort. According to the guide books, the geothermally-heated water emerges from the back of this small cave at 130° F and maintains a temperature in the six-foot wide pool averaging 103°. But hot springs fluctuate, and the sheer density of the cold hanging over the canyon chills the grotto. I stretch out, as best I can, to immerse myself and absorb as much heat as possible. I wait for the bursts of hot water that flow sometimes from a hidden place beneath and behind me. I do my best to make the best of it.

If asked about my favorite things in Oregon, I often reduce them to three H’s: hiking, huckleberries, and hot springs. The last of these I have loved since my first visit to Cougar Hot Springs, also known as Terwilliger, which is further downstream on the South Fork of the Mckenzie, the river dammed into a reservoir. Living in Eugene, Oregon at the time, friends and I—or I alone—visited these springs frequently. The first time I went, I had no idea what to expect. It was the summer of 1995, and only a week earlier I had moved west from upstate New York. My friend Kelly, from my hometown and living here a year already, drove us east into the mountains on the McKenzie Highway, turning on the Aufderheide scenic highway and continuing seven miles down a twisting road blasted into the basalt cliffs high above the reservoir built by the Army Corps of Engineers. We parked at a turnout at Rider Creek, designated by a sign which the hippies—Cougar’s most common visitors—had dubbed “I know you Rider Creek” after the Woody Guthrie song. I knew I would be, at least, among familiar people.

But when I got to the end of the trail and came down a rise, I looked down into a narrow gorge carved out by a cold creek and was shocked to see a series of descending pools filled with naked people. “They’re all naked together,” I thought. It was odd, momentarily untenable, but somehow exciting. I came from a small town where the idea of skinny-dipping elicited crude giggling, where nudity was generally forsaken. I knew I had to make a choice, and I did. I took off my clothes, hung them on the wooden pegs provided for that purpose, and slipped into the hottest pool, fed by a continuous stream pouring out from a hole in the rock big enough to crawl into. I have never turned back, never felt ashamed of my own body, and I have never stopped going to hot springs.

Which brought me to Bigelow, years later, alone in the pool just downstream from the confluence of the McKenzie and Deer Creek, lying prone, partially obscured by steam. I knew, of course, that I would eventually have to get out. Even the condensed droplets of steam that dripped from the tips of the melting ferns demonstrated how cold it would be. When I stood, the air pricked me like a thousand pins as the water beaded on my skin and began to freeze. I dried off as fast as I could and got dressed, glad for the wool and thermals. I was equally glad for the experience, and the body to feel it with. So it goes with experience: sometimes you do it for merely the story afterward.

I started the van, heating it up for a while, then let it roll onto the bridge. I looked down along the bank; the spring nowhere to be seen. It vanishes into the trees, so that if you were hiking the main trail, you would quickly pass above them without even noticing. Such is the nature of many unique places: you simply have to know. Which is why an entire subculture, of which I consider myself a part, has grown up around them. As I looked, I smiled. The springs are still a secret, if only for today. I was in the club, a “soaker,” a “hot springer.” I drove out and, despite the ruts of ice sloping precariously upward toward the highway, made it to the pavement to continue east over the Santiam Pass toward the high desert.

This particular morning stays in my mind, as do many other mornings at many hot springs across the state: springs in the Alvord Desert as well as the Calapooya Mountains, along state highways and half-ruined roads, from rustic bathhouses to heated swimming pools. Some are exceedingly popular, some virtually unknown. All have their distinct characteristics, their concurrent landscapes, their individual personality, and their unique clientele of hippies and hunters, mountain bikers and fishermen, students and soldiers, depending on what part of the state you happen to be traversing.

It is this morning, for me, that serves as a starting point. From that point on, I vowed that someday I would visit every hot spring in the state of Oregon. Later the idea congealed further: I would visit them all in one trip. I would find places I’d never been and revisit places I loved. I would take notes. I would write a book.

Oregon is volcanic country, its landscape a rugged reminder of the forces that have shaped it. Across vast stretches of the state, lava flows released from massive fissures in the earth’s crust built up plateaus of cooled magma thousands of feet thick. Some flowed hundreds of miles to the ocean, leaving the capes like great creatures crawling into the sea. The cones and plugs of extinct volcanoes dominate the skyline, casting long shadows over moonscapes of lesser vents and craters, over jumbles of cinder and rivers of black, jagged lava known as aa. Lava tubes, the drained subterranean veins that poured molten rock from the flanks of shield volcanoes, snake beneath the sagebrush deserts.

In the Badlands east of the city of Bend, a fine yellow ash coats the bed of a long-dead river. In such an unforgiving landscape as Dry River Canyon, little can survive but a few stray Ponderosa pines, sagebrush, and clumps of mountain mahogany. The canyon carved a notch into the flank of Horse Ridge in prehistoric times, draining what was once an enormous inland lake. Only a few Indian pictographs remain on a stretch of smoothed stone wall, signatures of a vanished people who once waited for the fish to come upstream, before the water dwindled to nothing. Wind is the only current now.

In western Oregon, where mountains and valleys facing the Pacific Ocean bathe winter long in copious rainfall, scars remain hidden beneath a dense conifer forest, thick with ferns and vine maples, buried in thousands of years of duff and fallen trees. Yet even here in the deep paradisiacal green that most people associate with Oregon, a few vestiges of a violent past survive: a waterfall on the Umpqua River pouring over oddly-geometric columnar basalt, the McKenzie River diving beneath a lava flow for three miles, a few towers of welded tuff in Castle Canyon, spires of heavily compressed ash. And scattered throughout the state, a web of steaming hot springs.

Along the horseshoe-shaped volcanic belt known as the Ring of Fire, no fewer than 452 volcanoes either smoke or sleep. Earthquakes threaten, however subtly. Nearly circling the edges of the Pacific Ocean, the belt is a long chain of ocean trenches, volcanic arcs, and the boundary of 60-mile thick colliding plates. Beneath the surface of America’s Pacific Northwest, located squarely on The Ring, is a simmering inner landscape of superheated igneous rock and magma. The West Coast’s positioning on this vast continental margin has warped its landforms through the folding, sliding, and crumpling of plate tectonics.

As heavy plates are carried down and subducted beneath other plates, the sinking rock is literally recycled through melting. Some mountains, like the Oregon Coast Range, rise like curling mud over a sliding spatula. Other ranges form when melted rock rises to emerge on the surface, forcing the upper crust to swell and explode, releasing tension sometimes powerful enough to incinerate everything around it, as nearby Mt. St. Helens demonstrated on May 18, 1980. That eruption, exploding with the force of a 10-megaton hydrogen bomb and powered by 1200° F steam so hot it glowed in the dark, spewed ash 12 miles into the sky and was heard as far away as Montana.

In the constant restlessness of the earth’s shifting plates, Oregon lies at a crucial junction along what is referred to as a “leading edge” of the North American plate, where collision and subduction happens. Beneath us, a great slab of cold Pacific seafloor—first the prehistoric Farallon plate, then the more recent Juan de Fuca and Pacific plates—has been sinking and sliding beneath the continental plate for at least 50 million years. This seafloor heats as it slips toward the deeper earth, eventually melting its bedrock crust of dark-hued igneous basalt. This fine-grained rock, when it becomes molten, actually becomes lighter than the ancient rocks in the earth’s crust, and because of its characteristic fluidity it floats upward to erupt in the volcanic fountains known as the Cascades, of which St. Helens is but one.

Whether standing in the grass fields of the central Willamette River Valley or in the Badlands of central Oregon, the Cascade Mountains are the state’s most obvious landmark. Extending along a series of faultlines running north and south from northern California through Oregon and Washington into British Columbia, these conspicuous relics of the region’s cataclysms mark a history extending at least as far as the Eocene, a period of time between 60 and 40 million years ago.

Following the stretch of the Willamette Valley in western Oregon, you easily see the terminal mounds of the range ending abruptly against the valley floor like so much rubble from an eroding pile of stones. In the remote past, when the Pacific Ocean covered half of Oregon, the tides beat against these buttes and hills, what is now some of the oldest rock in Oregon—the foothills of the range known as the Old Cascades, the heavily-glaciated ravines and knife-ridges left from oozing basalt and searing ash bled from earth’s sometimes fragile skin. Extinct for millions of years, these early flows left volcanic rock blended with sedimentary rock in deposits along the primeval seashore. Both rocks contain invertebrate, barnacle, and mollusk fossils from that era.

What followed these early eruptions was a long period of geologic quiet, until earth welled up again between 30 and 20 million years ago in the late Oligocene and early Miocene. What is now the desert landscape of eastern Oregon began to change dramatically during this time, from a jungle-like tropical terrain to more temperate climate with open, wooded grasslands as the ocean receded west. As the plates stretched the land taut, the brittle crust cracked along faults, releasing successive massive deluges of basalt flows that formed the high Columbia Plateau. As the earth twisted and pulled, the crust below this landscape thinned and exploded in what must have been a frightening array of pyrotechnics. Lava slouched over the land, and ash mixed with water formed massive mudflows that instantaneously buried and preserved the fossils of ancient oreodonts, horses, rhinoceroses, saber-toothed cats, land tortoises, and crocodiles, as well as the rich plant life, its leaves, seeds, and fruits, including the dawn redwood.

The last major activity crackled along the length of the Cascades about 15 to 10 million years ago, near the end of the Miocene, spilling basalt near the Blue Mountains that flowed over what is now three states, while eruptions of andesite piled up peaks in a line along the length of Oregon’s Cascades, straightening the coastline to a north-south shore and pushing the ocean further west. These eruptions left the ash deposits known as the John Day Formation, which were likely carried eastward on the hot wind, burying much of the prehistoric life in a series of fantastic forms: the striated mounds of the Painted Hills, the towering Clarno cliffs, teeming with fossils. The mountains left the former prairies in a rainshadow, and the redwoods and large browsing animals forever disappeared, replaced by oaks and cottonwood, shrews and squirrels.

The Ice Ages of the Pleistocene ground down the Cascades with deep glaciers that melted and flooded Oregon almost 2 million years ago. Boulders lay strewn in valleys, and long moraines fanned out like loose sheets to the valley floors. In western Oregon, Ice Age mammals were prolific in the dense forests and abundant rainfalls. About 11,000 years ago these animals began disappearing rapidly, about the time a corridor opened in the ice from the Bering Strait through Canada, when humans migrated to North America armed with spears and group hunting techniques.

Today the Cascade Range rises like a spine through Oregon, separating the broad Willamette Valley from the high deserts, brushing up against the Klamath Mountains in the south. The range is divided into two epochs: the long extinct western, or Old Cascades, folded and folded again like kneaded dough and continually worn down by mist, rainfall, and the cracking of its foundations by Douglas-fir roots; and the High Cascades, notably taller and composed of either recently extinct or active volcanoes. It is in this region where some of the more recent eruptions, many within the last 10,000 years, have occurred. The eastern plateaus and plains, forever cast in a climatic shadow, remain a dry forest of pine and a sprawling community of sagebrush and juniper.

Despite their covering of snow, the last fingerprint of the glaciers, the High Cascades resemble any other volcanic seam from Hawaii to Italy. Some mountains, Oregon’s Mt. Hood or Washington’s Mt. Rainier in particular, still have active fumaroles which vent the hot gases simmering below the earth’s surface, staining the snow yellow. Mt. St. Helens occasionally spurts steam and smoke into the sky to this day, building its inner lava dome to new heights—thus the Indian name, “Old Smoker.”

Deep underground, below the volcanic underpinnings, there is water. Some of it rainfall seeped through the porous basalt, through open cracks and fractures, and some of it what scientists believe is “Virgin Water,” that which has never touched the surface. Across the state, water from these wells emerges through springs, and it is not unusual to be fairly high in the mountains—say, 4000 feet above sea level—and hear water gurgling from a hole in the rock, or from beneath a stump, or bubbling from mud. Oregon is rich with cold water springs, where a traveler can drink from cupped hands. What is more peculiar, but in abundance in the Pacific Northwest, is the hot spring.

For a spring to exist, all that is required is a fissure where the water can emerge into daylight. A spring, as opposed to a seep, is a fixed point where water emerges in a flow; it may be from a spot on the ground or even, in many cases, from the bottom of a lake. A spring is “thermal” if it is at least fourteen degrees hotter than the average temperature of the air. Temperatures of springs can, and do, rise to a skin-threatening simmer. They occur in volcanic areas, however dormant, where temperatures one mile below the surface can be hotter than 85° F, and at two miles can be hot enough to boil water. Twenty-five miles down rock is molten, a liquid mass at 2500° F.

Below the surface, groundwater simmers: water filtered down from rainfall—this happens especially in the porous basalt landscape of Oregon—and virgin water thought to come from the compression of subterranean rock with water trapped inside. Magma produces heat which conducts through a layer of solid rock—igneous rock, solidified from magma—up into the porous rock. The water is heated deep below and rises as any other spring: sometimes at the bottom of a lake, sometimes in marshes, sometimes through silt, and sometimes right out of a gaping hole in a cliff. What is needed, in any case, is a conduit along a fault zone in the rock for the water to travel. The same phenomenon produces both geysers and fumaroles. As the plates shift about, magma comes closer to the surface, thus making it easier for rainwater to find its way to the heat source. As the water rises from the dark earth, it accumulates different minerals and chemicals like iron or sulfur. A spring can be alkaline, saline, chalybeate, sulphurous, acidulous, and arsenical. Each has properties that humans throughout time believed is not only beneficial, but outright healing.

Human history of using hot springs extends back at least to the Bronze Age, some 5000 years ago, and more than likely beyond half a million years. In North America, human use of hot springs is extensive. Native American tribes had known about the springs, of course, for at least hundreds, if not thousands of years. They considered the springs a gift from their Creator, the Great Spirit, who warmed them with his breath. In many places, it was customary for springs to be a designated neutral zone where any tribe could rest and heal, even during times of war. The Pacific Northwest was no exception.

Archeological evidence reveals that as early as 500 B.C.E., the Mayans made use of thermal springs near Lake Amatitlán near Guatemala City. The Aztecs believed springs were the abodes of gods and goddesses, and hot springs in central Mexico were pilgrimage destinations for priests. The now famous hot springs site in Arkansas was called the Valley of the Vapours, where in 1541 Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto found warring tribes bathing together.

A common name for Hot Springs across North America was some variant of “Medicine Springs,” which was the name the Mohawks gave Saratoga Springs, and the Iroquois, Shawnee, and Tuscarora gave to the springs near Bedford, Pennsylvania.

The Lake and Coast Miwok used Harbin Springs in northern California as a seasonal camp. Ellen Klazer, in a pamphlet for Harbin Hot Springs resort, writes that to a shaman “the waters of a hot springs were an entrance way to the underworld. In a trance state, induced by meditating on such a point of entrance—a natural tunnel, rock crevasse or spring—a shaman could travel from the material world to the spirit realm. There he could talk to the spirits and do healing work which, when returning to a non-trance state, he brought back to the people of his tribe. Since these natural openings to the spirit world are rare, the springs were considered to be a very special and sacred point in the already sacred material world.”