Siouxon Creek | MOST BEAUTIFUL Swimming Hole of Washington State

Fern Canyon on steroids. Good morning from the southwestern corner of Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Fun fact, Gifford Pinchot, no relation to Bronson Pinchot of Perfect Stranger's fame. You may remember him as Cousin Balky. Don't be ridiculous. Anyway, southwestern corner of Washington State and the area we are exploring today is, I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce it, I believe it's Susong Creek. And we spent several hours driving over mountain roads and dirt roads to get here. It's not an easy trip. It's a couple hours from Portland and probably three hours, three and a half hours from Seattle. Woke up in this magical fairy forest last night. Had an awesome campsite right here among these moss and fern covered trees. And actually, we did a little exploring yesterday, right before we went to bed, down on West Creek, which is another creek that feeds into Susong Creek. So I'm excited to show you that because that was absolutely beautiful. Almost like a fern canyon on steroids. But Susong Creek is supposed to have some of the best swimming holes in the state of Washington with some beautiful big pools and some waterfalls that flow into them. So let's check it out. It's about two and a quarter miles to the first of the big swimming holes and then another quarter mile or half of a mile past that to the second waterfall with a swimming hole in it. But first, so come down this trail, drops you down to the to the creek here. But first, I definitely want to show you the West Creek that we explored last night, where we grabbed some water to filter and stuff like that, because it was absolutely beautiful. So we're actually going to be continuing across this bridge down Susong Creek. But first, I wanted to go up this side creek here, West Creek, because it's so beautiful. I think it's fascinating to see these these downed trees act as nurseries and incubators for all this plant life. See new trees springing out from the from the dead decaying trees here, cycle perpetuate itself. And it's, you know, initially, like before I spent a lot of time in forests, I thought a tree falls down, just turns to mulch and then eventually dirt. I never thought that as the tree was kind of still holding its shape as a tree, that process of breaking down, you would begin to see new life spring up. So you see this a lot in the forest, these downed trees become a haven, a nursery to incubate new life to replace the tree that has fallen. Pretty leisurely stroll here. One of these beautiful trees and ferns, not much elevation gain. I think pretty much the bulk of the elevation is on the way back up to trailhead. But I don't think it's too much less than 500 feet, something like that. This is beautiful. Walking through this wide, well maintained trail. Knees are actually bothering me a little bit. We've been averaging about anywhere between seven and 12 miles a day, almost every day. So getting a lot of exercise and a lot of hiking. And I feel like I dropped probably 10 or 15 pounds. Sometimes in the thinking, another swimming hole, another beautiful swimming hole, the waterfall. I don't even want to. And then I get there and I'm like, man, I'm glad I'm here. Just got to the first swimming hole here. Nice waterfall, beautiful, wide, deep, bluish green pool. Looks really refreshing. So we're going to hit that swimming hole, that first one on the way back. And right now just continuing on about another half a mile to the furthest or the second really good swimming hole, which is, I guess, supposed to be these two are the best on here. I mean, I'm sure there's other smaller ones on here, but that one and then this one that's half a mile up are pretty much the most beautiful on Susan Creek. The water is a little cold. I don't think it's too bad, but the sun is not really shining. So it might be colder than I would like right now if you catch my drift. So we're back at this first and bigger pool on Susan Creek. So big, so deep, bigger waterfall. The sun had come out for a second there, but has retreated behind some overcast skies. Right before we left that other pool, I was going into my backpack to open up our snack bag, to eat my Clif Bar, and saw that something, a mouse, a rat, a squirrel, chipmunk, had eaten through the bag, the mesh bag, and taken some bites out of my Clif Bar. So now we're faced with the dilemma that we possibly have some sort of rodent living in our car, or at least temporarily residing in our car. So that's something we might have to deal with. So this first pool, about three or four times as big as that second one that we ended up swimming in first, but let's see how deep it is. Deep, deep, right under the waterfall, and pretty much the entire thing is pretty deep. Super cold though, definitely colder than that smaller pool, which makes sense because larger body water is going to take longer to heat up. Infamous.