Me and Max woke up with an itch to hike to Gunpowder Crk. Hotsprings to soak in an ancient cedar log inside an ancient cedar forest.

Don’t go looking for Gunpowder Crk. Hotsprings. I manufactured the name Gunpowder Crk. Htsprngs. to hide the site from you and to ensure me and Max do not catch sight of your unsightly naked body at Gunpowder Crk. next weekend.

Max becomes inordinately enthused when we begin hiking the trail to Gunpowder Crk. Htsprngs. He knows there is a hot soak that pays for the labor of the hike.

I take pains to explain to Max that wilderness hot springs are extremely sacred and mystical. “Maybe we should do some yoga on this mystical bridge,” Max said in a facetious tone, and then he struck a warrior pose variation that sent a chakra compression into the forest and woke up all the dozing animals. Max is facetious but his prana is very correct.

Before too long we sighted the old bath house through the trees.

And the hot water culvert, carved from a young pine log, that carries the 135 degree water from the spring to the bath house.

The communal tubs were pretty fun. We saw lots of penises and boobs right off the bat and everyone was smoking jazz cigarettes and talking about the shit state of the zodiac. Max tore off all his clothes, dove into the tub, and instantly became the fond mascot of the community tubs. While Max was being passed from folknik to folknik, I spoke quietly with a young couple about our mutual desire to ski from Glacier to Yellowstone to Teton to Dinosaur and then walk the rest of way to Glen Canyon and finally to Death Valley.

We hugged everyone goodbye at the communal tubs and found ourselves a private tub where we could swim some laps in an old cedar log and carve some hilarious sayings into the walls. We are always amazed about the old growth logs that’ve been carved into gigantic bath tubs, like coast-tribe canoes.

We collected some cold water from the creek to balance the temperature of our soaking log.

We drank some hot chocolate and ate an orange. When we were done eating our orange we rubbed the peels in our armpits to anoint and deodorize ourselves and prepare ourselves to go home.

On the hike out we paused to watch the river.”I want to be a river,” I said to Max. Max said, “I want to be a wizard.”