How to Visit Thousand Springs State Park in Southern Idaho

Southern Idaho is home to a lot of natural beauty and in today's video we'd like to introduce you to Thousand Springs State Park. One thing that's interesting is that this park is actually broken up into several different units. We're going to start off at Millaud Gorge State Park. If you plan on visiting this is a great place to start at. As far as we know this is the only unit of the park that has a manned booth where you can pay your entry fee, which was seven dollars at The first stop in the park takes you to a footbridge that gives you one of the best views of the gorge. There are however a lot of different angles if you feel like exploring the area further. This trail is quite short and ended up taking us to a beautiful overlook of a waterfall that we're going to get even closer to in just a little bit. One of the great things about this park is that all of the stops are located directly off of one main road. This makes it really easy to see everything including that other view of the waterfall. The entire park can be seen in just a couple of hours and soon we're off to our next stop which is Box Canyon Springs. These springs are located only about 15 minutes away from Millaud Gorge but it is a little bit more of a rugged experience. There is some hiking involved but I promise that it is so beautiful that it is well worth the effort. One great thing about our visit here is that since we paid our entry fee at Millaud Gorge it covered our entry into the rest of Thousand Springs for the rest of the day. This hike is beautiful and fairly short. If you do the out and back version like we did it's only 2.4 miles long and if you do the entire loop it's 2.9. Fun fact this waterfall is being fed by the 11th largest spring in the United States. One word of warning there are a lot of slippery parts on this trail so you definitely want to bring shoes with plenty of traction and you also need to watch out for stinging nettle because we did see some. The trail comes to a conclusion at this gorgeous turquoise pool. I'm not gonna lie the water was pretty darn cold but we visited on a warm day so it was actually quite refreshing. Even though there were other people there the pool is really large and everyone was able to be really spread out. It felt like you almost had the place completely to yourself. I would definitely say that if you only have time for one or two stops this should be one of them. The third and final stop of our day was Niagara Springs. This is located about 30 minutes away from Box Canyon Springs. One great thing about these springs is just how accessible they are. Shortly after driving down the hill into the park you should come to this bridge and the springs are right there. If you want to get a better look at the springs you can take a short paved path to a scenic overlook. It's pretty incredible to see the amount of water that comes out of these springs. From there you can enjoy some of the other amenities that this park has to offer. Just past the welcome sign there is a large grass area that's perfect for relaxation and picnics. Everything here is really well taken care of and it's a beautiful spot. We were really wishing that we had our kayaks with us because there are some fantastic kayaking opportunities here. Not only do you have the Snake River on one side of the park but a little further down the road there was a small lake. There were a couple of people out on the lake in their kayaks and the conditions looked absolutely perfect. The water was like glass and it gave us a beautiful reflection of the mountains. We always go pretty hard on our trips and we accomplished a lot on this day but we didn't get to everything that we wanted to see. Ritter Island ended up closing at 3 p.m so we didn't make it in time. It looks really beautiful and we'd like to send a huge thank you out to the Idaho Parks and Recreation Department for sending us the videos of it. We will definitely hit that on our next visit. If you enjoy this video be sure to like comment and subscribe because those are the best things you can do to support this channel. Check us out on Instagram at thatadventurelife underscore official and for all the information about Thousand Springs State Park and other awesome things to do in Idaho, head on over to thatadventurelife.com