Two pools, and they are not the same water
The hot pool is mineral water off a fault. The cold pool is a chlorinated swimming pool with a lane line and a NO DIVING sign. People come for the first and are grateful for the second, in that order, usually within about twenty minutes.
The hot spring itself runs between 128 and 146°F depending on how much snow is melting — far too hot to sit in — so the pool blends it with cold water down to something a person can stand. That blending is not a modern convenience. It has been the practice here since the early 1900s.
What it costs and when it opens
The pools run Friday through Monday, 10am to 7pm, in five sessions: 10:00, 11:45, 1:30, 3:45 and 5:30, each an hour and a half, first come first served — no advance booking. That is the pools' own posted sheet, photographed at the door in September 2026.
Parking at the pool is $8, or $7 if you are 62 or over — the posted sheet's only stated fee. The park's website has also listed pool admission at adults $10 / children $5; confirm at the gate. The park itself is open sunrise to sunset year-round, and you can walk the meadow without going near the pools.
The September closure is real. The park confirmed it by phone, September 2026: the pools close for two full weeks of maintenance each fall, usually the last week of September through the first week of October. Plan an early-fall soak around it.
Phone before you go: (530) 694-2249 for the pool, (530) 694-2248 for the park. This is not a formality. On the morning we last checked, the state's own website said the pools were open Friday to Monday in two places and said the complex was closed in a third, all on the same page.
Dogs are welcome in the park on a leash, and are not allowed in the pool complex. There is also a standing bear notice: food and anything scented goes in the lockers, day and night.
The pool is heated by an earthquake fault
Not by magma. There is no volcano under Grover doing this, though the skyline is made of dead ones.
Rain and snowmelt sink into fractured rock, warm against hot rock at depth, and rise again — and the conduit is most likely a splay of the Genoa Fault, the same fault that makes the west wall of Carson Valley and last broke about four hundred and fifty years ago at an estimated magnitude 7.5. You can drive to its polished scarp near Walley's.
Before anyone built anything here there were a dozen springs and seeps, in two marshy patches about a hundred yards apart on the south side of Hot Springs Creek. The water is slightly acidic, gas-charged and rich in sodium bicarbonate, and it leaves travertine behind as it cools — look for the pale mineral crust at the outlets.
What the fire did, and how long it took
The Tamarack Fire came through in July 2021. It destroyed park housing, the maintenance shop, vehicles, and trail structures, and the park closed outright.
Day use came back in May 2022 — hiking and picnicking only, sunrise to sunset. The campground followed in June 2022, and only partly: the water system had been hit by debris flows, and that governed how many sites could open.
The pools did not reopen until December 2023. Two and a half years.
The park's own page carries no fire notice today, and the campground is back to seventy-six sites. But the accessibility page still warns that parts of the meadow trail may be impassable from wildfire and debris-flow damage, and the Forest Service's caution for burned ground holds beyond the park boundary: hazard trees come down without warning, burned stump holes collapse underfoot, and rain moves debris fast.
Two walks from the same parking lot
The meadow boardwalk — 0.84 miles each way, ADA accessible. Compacted aggregate, mostly under five per cent grade. This is the only trail here with an official published mileage, and the park's own caveat travels with it: parts may be inaccessible from fire and debris-flow damage.
The waterfall trail — about two and a half miles round trip, and the sources disagree. The park calls it moderate; the trail databases call it easy; published distances run from 2.3 to 3.0 miles round trip and there is no official figure to settle it. It crosses the meadow, follows Hot Springs Creek, and finishes over a boulder field where the footing and the route-finding both get harder. At the end is a waterfall of about fifty feet in several cascades.
Worth knowing: the waterfall is not in the park. It sits on Forest Service ground beyond the boundary, which is where the burn hazards stop being somebody's job to manage.
If you would rather not pay to park, the Charity Valley East trailhead is free, nine minutes from here, and about a mile short of the park entrance on the same road.
Staying nearby
The park's campground has seventy-six sites. Twelve minutes down the road there are also seven cabins, eleven riverside sites and RV hookups on the East Fork, open year-round.
