Hot Creek: Beauty That Can Boil You
Near Mammoth Lakes, California
Hot Creek looks like a postcard, a cold clear stream winding through a gorge, with brilliant turquoise pools steaming along its banks. Those pools are the surface expression of the Long Valley volcanic system. Rainwater and snowmelt sink deep into the ground, get heated by the hot rock left behind by the caldera, and rise back up along faults, emerging here as hot springs.
Underground the water reaches temperatures of at least four hundred thirty degrees Fahrenheit, and some pools at the surface boil at close to two hundred degrees. For decades people soaked in Hot Creek where the hot springs mixed with the cold stream, but this is a living, unstable geothermal field. In two thousand six, the springs suddenly grew more violent, spurting scalding, muddy water several feet into the air without warning.
The Forest Service closed parts of the gorge, because the activity could no longer be reliably predicted. People have suffered severe burns here, and some have died, after ignoring warnings. You can still visit and photograph Hot Creek, and it is well worth seeing.
Just admire the blue pools from behind the barriers, because the ground here can change from calm to killing in an instant.
