Vacation The Final Day

OK, its Saturday Morning and after a meager breakfast of cereal we decided to drive out to a place called Grover Hot Springs State Park.

I thought this would be cool because it's on the way to the East Fork of the Carson River and maybe I could do a little fishing over there. You drive into the little town of Markleeville and hang a right for four miles to GHS.  

Grover Hot Springs SP

This is one of those places that has geothermal water running into a pool that you can bathe in. They say it has medicinal purposes and some friends of ours swear by it. There is a hot springs pool and a regular pool. When we got there, there was a line so we opted for looking around and passing on the pools. The three pictures below show the outlets and where the water runs down into the meadow below.

The meadow

One outlet

A second outlet

The sign says "don't drink the water", duh!

After we got back into the truck my wife said "Let's go to Tahoe". So much for fishing the East Fork. Back the way we came, hung a right on Highway 89 (right there by the 88/89 "fish them to extinction" hole), over Luther Pass and into the traffic nightmare of South Lake Tahoe.

We parked behind Harrah's and walked over to the Montbleu (used to be Caesars Palace) and with $80.00 split between us headed for the slots. We played some 25 cent slots, penny slots, and some video poker and when we walked out, we still had $60.00 which we promptly left in the American River Cafe in Harrah's for lunch. We are not big gamblers because my wife sees enough of that every work at day. She works at the Jackson Rancheria Indian Casino in Jackson.

On  the way out of town we stopped at a little flea market and the only interesting thing I saw, besides strawberries, was a guy with a bowl of flies for $1.00 each. I looked through then and couldn't see anything I wanted to spend any money on. They were dries in a chartreuse green color and several different patterns. Might have been good around the lake somewhere, but didn't float my boat. Oh, there was a 12' aluminum boat for sale there too, but a little pricey at $1000.00.

Once we got back to the camp, I grabbed my fly rod and wandered over to the West Fork of the Carson to see if the "fish to extinction" crowd left any fish there and of course, they left NOTHING.

I walked downstream about a quarter mile without casting a fly. The water was really low and very warm. If there was something there (and I saw one spook way downstream) it wouldn't have been good to even try to catch anything.    

Sunday we packed up and headed home stopping for lunch at Kirkwood Inn. I think there might be a tent trailer in my future. Hard to get these old bodies off the mattress on the ground. We'll see.

Mark