Barth Hot Springs

River-only soak: Barth Hot Springs is a real, public, wilderness soak on the Main Salmon River, reached only by boat. This page records what the registries, the Forest Service, and the river guides document, including the one thing nobody has measured, the temperature of the pool itself.

Barth Hot Springs is the Main Salmon’s own hot spring: a documented soak above the river at about river mile 22 to 23, inside the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in Idaho County, at about 2,700 feet (registry point 45.512, -115.046). The federal thermal springs list carries it at a maximum of 140 °F on the Sheep Hill quadrangle, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s GEOTHERM file carries it at 61 °C, the same scalding neighborhood.

Nobody soaks in the vent water. What river parties soak in is the pool it feeds, a chest-deep tub perched above the Salmon where the cooled water gathers at the canyon’s edge, and Barth has been a standard stop on Main Salmon trips for as long as the river has been run for pleasure.

Read the access plainly before anything else: there is no road and no trailhead. Barth is reached by floating the permitted Main Salmon from Corn Creek, about 22 river miles upriver, or by jet boat running up from the Vinegar Creek ramp far below, and then by a short, steep walk up from the landing.

The Forest Service, which runs the river’s permit system, names Barth in its boater orientation and attaches rules to it: no camping at the springs, no lunch stop, no soap, and care on the loose wet rocks of the climb. Inside those rules, it is as public as any place in Idaho. It is just public at the end of a river trip.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

Two ways in, both on the water. Downriver parties meet Barth on the second day of a Main Salmon float out of Corn Creek, after Black Creek Rapid and the Black Canyon water, and the major outfitters build the stop in when conditions allow: ROW Adventures calls it a classic day-two stop, and OARS describes the quick, steep hike up to the tub.

Upriver parties come by jet boat from the Vinegar Creek boat ramp, about 27 miles east of Riggins by road and some 56 river miles below the springs; one operator runs a private day trip on that route in the spring months. Either way, the last stretch is on foot: the pool sits about 1,000 feet off the river, up a rock field with no dedicated trail, and the footing around the springs is loose and wet.

The permit frame governs the float. The Main Salmon’s lottery season runs June 20 to September 7, with permits allocated through Recreation.gov, and the river’s 79-mile wilderness section from Corn Creek to Carey Creek is a five to six day trip for most parties. Jet boat trips run outside the float pattern, in the April to June window their operators advertise. There is no winter road, no snow season, and no shoulder-season shortcut: when the river parties stop coming, Barth goes back to the canyon.

The Soak

The pool is the point of the place, and the river literature describes one consistent arrangement: a natural tub at the canyon’s edge, fed by water trickling up from the spring, deep enough to sit in chest-deep, with the Main Salmon running below and the whole canyon in view from the water. The Salmon River Outfitters Association calls it an infinity pool in effect, its edge blending into the drop toward the river, with emerald water and a sandy beach at the landing below. One outfitter counts room for about a dozen soakers.

Expect company in permit season and solitude almost never; this is the best-known hot spring on the Main Salmon, and every party on the river knows the stop. What no one should expect is a measured pool temperature on this page: the vent runs at a scalding 140 °F maximum in the registries, the pool is tempered by its run and the canyon air, and no source consulted has ever published a thermometer reading from the tub itself. Test the water the way river parties always have, with a hand first.

History

Barth’s history is river history, and the river histories tell it consistently. In the sweep boat era, captain Harry Guleke, the most famous of the Salmon’s scow boatmen, made the springs a regular stop on his runs down the river, and for over 30 years they carried his name: Guleke Hot Springs. In the 1920s a homesteader named Jim Barth built his place on the bench above the springs, and the name on the maps changed to his.

The flat rocks near the springs carry the canyon’s habit of signing in: carved names and dates from the boatmen’s era, among them a J. N. McKay inscription dated 1872, 1905, and 1914, still legible at lower flows. The springs then pass into the modern record the way most Idaho springs do, through the geothermal surveys: sampled by the USGS in 1980, carried at 140 °F in the federal thermal list, and filed in GEOTHERM, while the river around them became designated wilderness and Wild and Scenic water in 1980. The soak the surveys never described is the one the boaters kept using the whole time.

Nearby Hot Springs

Barth stands alone on its river: the Forest Service orientation treats it as the Main Salmon’s hot spring stop, and no other documented soak shares its reach of the canyon. The nearest full listings on this site are country neighbors, not river companions: Red River Hot Springs, the Elk City corridor resort about 25 straight-line miles northeast, and Burgdorf Hot Springs, about 30 miles southwest across the divide. More North-Central Idaho hot springs →