Meadow Hot Springs | Utah Destinations

V & I recently headed to Vegas and Los Angeles for a few shoots.  Most of the time when we travel, we drive; and this trip was no different.  There’s something about packing up the SUV with all our gear (camera bags, crates of lighting gear, tons of stands, etc) that gets my blood flowing in anticipation of heading out ~on location.~

We’ve done the southwest I-15 drive numerous, numerous times and, randomly, something about this particular drive made V pipe up, “hey! Let’s check out the hot springs!”  We were a few hours south of SLC when he decided to mention these mysterious hot springs to me.  “What hot springs?”  “Meadow.”

Now, V often sputters single word sentences in response to questions, and they don’t always make sense off the bat, so sometimes I marinate on his choice of words, trying to figure out what he means.  In this case… I was lost.  Is the hot springs in a meadow?  Did I mishear him?  What what?!

My questions were answered a few miles later when the town of Meadow materialized next to the highway.  A few turns after exiting, we were driving down a completely empty, middle-of-nowhere dirt path under Armageddon-style skies.  There were no signs or markers about any hot springs (and V’s intuition isn’t always reason enough for me to trust his sense of direction).

“Umm, how do you know about these hot springs?” I inquired.  He mentioned having stopped there several times with his hiking friends when they’d be heading back from a trek through Escalante.  “Lots of hippies come here naked sometimes.”  Okay.  I can’t say that made me any more enthusiastic about reaching the springs.

20 minutes down the road to nowhere, we butted bumpers with a cul-de-sac.  A broken-down fence revealed a path.  We got out of the car & continued another quarter mile, no one and nothing in sight for miles.  Eventually a teeny pool appeared.  From a distance it looked like a mud puddle, but as we got closer I saw that at the center of the small pond lay a deep aqua hole that descended into the earth.

I loved it.  Everything.  The smile on V’s face, the warmth of the water in the spring, the snow-capped mountains on the horizon, the golden fields all around us, and the setting sun casting threads of light onto the heavy clouds.  I loved that we were a-l-o-n-e alone to revel in this serenity.  I loved that V thought to bring me there on that particular day, almost as though sharing that space with me any previous time wouldn’t have been as magical or as peaceful.

It was, simply, a perfect moment.  And then… it passed.   The sun dropped below the mountains and I looked at V with a tilt of my head.  A soft wind tangled strands of my hair as he took my hand and led me back to the car to resume our trip.