Kwiskwis Hot Spring

Backcountry soak: Kwiskwis Hot Spring is a real, public, wilderness soak, reached only by a long backpack in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. This page records what the registries and the trail literature document, including the gap between the hot source and the soakable pool.

Kwiskwis Hot Spring is the deep one: a small wilderness pool at the confluence of Kwiskwis Creek and Indian Creek, inside the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Valley County, on the creek that flows northeast to the Middle Fork of the Salmon River (registry point 44.831, -115.215). The federal thermal springs list carries the source at a maximum of 156 °F on the Big Baldy quadrangle, and the USGS GEOTHERM file carries the same vent at 69.4 °C in Township 17 North, Range 10 East, Section 11.

What a backpacker actually meets at the creek is smaller and kinder: the trail record describes a two person pool at the confluence, tempered by creek water to around 100 °F. Of the springs in the federal record along Indian Creek, this is the one the hiking literature sends people to, and every route to it is measured in miles and days, not minutes.

Read the temperatures on this page the way the record gives them. The 156 °F figure is a source maximum from the survey era, far too hot to soak in at the vent. The soak exists because Kwiskwis Creek does the mixing: the pool the guides describe holds near 100 °F, which happens to be the temperature most soakers would pick on purpose. The site is summer country: the trail guides put the best months at July through September, the roads to the trailheads are snowbound in winter, and Indian Creek runs high and cold with snowmelt into early summer.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

Every way in is a backpack, and the trail record documents three. The shortest is the point to point route listed as Kwiskwis Hot Spring via Mule Hill and Indian Creek Trail: 13.3 miles and about 3,375 feet of elevation gain, rated strenuous, beginning with a long descent from the Mule Hill Trailhead into the Indian Creek gorge. The guides call it remote and seldom hiked, and its two trail reviews are not enthusiastic, which is part of the honest picture: the tread is faint in places, deadfall crosses it, and the creek gorge earns its soak the hard way.

The second way is the long way around: the Big Baldy to Indian Creek Loop, a 52 mile wilderness loop the Forest Service area guide rates very difficult with very light use, for experienced and conditioned backpackers. The loop crosses Indian Creek on the Grays Peak Trail, then follows Trail 225, the Indian Creek Trail, past Kwiskwis Creek and the springs to Kiwah Meadow, the documented camp for this stretch.

The third way starts in the air: fly to the Indian Creek landing strip on the Middle Fork of the Salmon, then hike about 10 miles up Indian Creek to the springs and camp at Kiwah Meadow, as a published trekking itinerary describes. Whichever way you come, the season is the real gate: the area guide puts the best months at July through September, snow closes the trailhead roads in winter, and the creek crossings are at their worst in spring runoff.

The Soak

The soak is a small one, and the record is refreshingly plain about it. At the confluence where Kwiskwis Creek meets Indian Creek, hot water rising at a source the registries carry at 156 °F meets cold creek water, and the pool that forms holds, in the trail record’s words, around 100 °F, big enough for two people. That is the whole documented facility: no tub, no bathhouse, no development of any kind, in keeping with the wilderness around it.

Expect a primitive creek side pool whose exact shape depends on what the creek and the last visitors left behind, in a deep gorge far from any road. Parties who make the walk tend to camp at Kiwah Meadow, just beyond the springs on the Indian Creek Trail, and soak as a trip’s reward rather than as a destination in itself. Treat the site with wilderness care: it sees very few people, and nothing about it is maintained.

History

The spring enters the written record through the geothermal surveys, and its name does the rest of the talking. Ross noted it in the state Bureau of Mines and Geology’s 1971 geothermal pamphlet, and the survey era that followed carried it at 69 °C: Mitchell and others reported that figure in 1980, the federal thermal springs list fixed it at 156 °F, and the USGS GEOTHERM file filed it as record 0081294 under the spelling Kwiskwis (Quis-quis).

The state dataset is candid that its own entry was not field checked, which is a fair summary of the spring’s whole documentary life: written down from a distance, by survey parties, in a wilderness that was formally designated in 1980 and that has kept the spring obscure ever since. No homestead, mine, guard station, or named person is tied to the spring in any source consulted, and this listing does not invent one. Its history since the surveys is a hiker’s history, a name on the Indian Creek Trail that most loop walkers pass and very few stop for.

Nearby Hot Springs

The nearest full listing is Pistol Creek Hot Springs, another Frank Church wilderness record roughly 10 straight line miles northeast toward the Middle Fork. Down the river corridor is Sheepeater Hot Springs, on the Middle Fork itself. Two more registry springs sit on Indian Creek below Kwiskwis, Indian Creek Hot Spring and Middle Fork Indian Creek Hot Spring, both documented in the federal record and neither yet listed on this site. More East-Central Idaho hot springs →