Hours of Daylight – 9:53
Ok, so Annette decided she wanted a long weekend. In Idaho if you’re not stinking rich and/or you don’t ski a long weekend means one thing: hot springs. I, being the good "chopper pilot" that i am, provided the transportation. She handled the accommodations.
After i finished my big 4 hours of "paid" work at the new job we drove up 55 through McCall (note to self: why do so many people like McCall?) and over the hump to New Meadows. We found our hotel, found our room, and found Zim’s hot springs in that order with great ease. It’s kind of hard to hide things in New Meadows given only about 350 people live there.
Zim’s is fine old-school soaking establishment. It’s been there for many years and has been owned and run by the same family for all of its life.$6.50 buys you a day of unlimited soaking in the two concrete outdoor pools. One is actually Olympic sized and kept at a pleasant 95 degrees. The smaller pool hovers around 105. Alternating between the two makes for a very nice couple of hours. Thing is the larger pool has a basketball net, and attracts large numbers of local teenagers who generate vast quantities of noise playing water basketball. But they eventually leave and the place becomes quiet and nicely relaxing.
A virtual trademark of movies shot in New York City is the steam rising from manholes. You know what i mean; the bad guy emerges from a cloud of steam like some devil coming up out of hell. Even when the rising steam isn’t featured so prominently it still suggests the fires of Hades lurk just below the asphalt of our world. In case you didn’t know all that steam is generated by various electrical generating plants that ring Manhattan and is piped to buildings to provide heating and cooling. See, many years ago city planners realized that having buildings heated by individual furnaces would be highly impractical. Remember nearly everybody in Manhattan came from somewhere else. One of those places was London a city renowned for it’s soot. That soot came from the coal fires of a million stoves. Bad. So central steam plants were established in Manhattan to provide heat for the larger buildings. That’s why you don’t see chimneys on the Empire State building or the Chrysler building. But here in Idaho there are many areas where the fires of Hades do lurk just below the placid crust of our topside world. Note the steaming river. Brings to mind Radar’s panicked moment on MASH when he and Hawkeye are out in the bush on the evac bus and the Korean woman is about to give birth, "I could go for hot water…. maybe there’s a hot river nearby… like in Yellowstone!" Well, we’ve got a hot river right here.
The other thing that is very important to keep in mind as winter comes on in Idaho is elevation. Zim’s is in nestled in the very pretty "Meadows Valley" along the occasionally steamy Little Salmon River. But you can see that only about 250 feet up the sides of the valley the weather changes from clear and cold to extremely clouded and snowy. As the winter progresses that fairly clear "snow line" will descend to the valley floor. The Meadows Valley is about 3900 feet which puts it about 1100 feet higher than Boise, so the snow line will descend into the Meadows Valley before it descends into the "Treasure Valley" where Boise sits. But it will get here soon enough… winter’s coming on.