If you've ever been to Umpqua Hot Springs, you might have mixed feelings about the place.

The natural hot springs - nestled into the Umpqua National Forest in Oregon's Cascade Mountains - is stunning. The view is spectacular and the turquoise pools are perfectly hot, but some visitors are also stunned by the trash, the drug use and the behavior of some of their fellow soakers.

One TripAdvisor reviewer put it this way: "Your impression and enjoyment of the springs is equally proportional to your comfort level for a lot of the goings-on."

And those "goings-on" have gotten out of hand, according to forest officials. On Tuesday, the United States Forest Service banned overnight camping at the springs, and the area has been converted into a day-use site in an attempt to clean it up and let the land recover.

"We need to try to get this area back to what the public expects when they go out to a forest," said Jimmy Tyree, Diamond Lake District Ranger for Umpqua National Forest. "The use this past fall and summer was incredible."

HUMAN WASTE, BACTERIA AND BLEACH

How bad was it? According to the U.S. Forest Service, the state of Umpqua Hot Springs was downright atrocious.

For the last year, forest officials have been documenting problems at the site stemming from groups of long-term campers. Tyree said campers were tossing trash on the ground, cutting down trees, violating campfire bans and leaving behind incredible amounts of human waste.

Forest officials discovered more than 100 piles of human feces around the hot springs, he said, despite the presence of a vault toilet at the trailhead.

"That type of human waste everywhere, that was just unacceptable to us," he said.

A map created by the U.S. Forest Service shows more than 100 piles of human feces found around Umpqua Hot Springs. (Photo courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service)

It's not the only health hazard at the site. Umpqua Hot Springs temporarily closed last September after water tests found dangerously high levels of the bacterium E. coli. Two weeks later, the water tested for unusually low levels of bacteria, but extremely high levels of bleach - the result of visitors allegedly trying to combat the closure by cleaning the water, according to forest officials.

User-submitted reviews on TripAdvisor and Yelp reveal an ongoing problem at the hot springs, most penning the blame on groups of "hippies" or "vagabonds" who frequent the site. They leave some visitors feeling on edge in a place that's supposed to be peaceful.

Molly Brady visited for the first time the weekend before the closure, and said those negative reviews were spot-on.

"I actually sat with and visited with several of these transient forest dwellers who call themselves outlaws and have a very Charles Manson sort of attitude," Brady wrote in an email. "I didn't feel safe, my things didn't feel safe, and there were tons of these people or 'followers' so they said back at camp."

Illegal drug use - from methamphetamines to DMT - was rampant, Brady added, turning the springs into "nothing short of a crack house."

"The forest service did the right thing," she said of the camping ban. "It is not a safe environment for anyone trying to relax."

THE "HIPPIES"

A lot is said about the people deemed responsible for the mess at the hot springs, but who are these "outlaws," "vagabonds" and "hippies"?

The online reviews paint the long-term campers as either free-spirits who keep to themselves, or violent criminals who harass fellow soakers. Either way, they tend to gather mostly at night, when the relaxed setting transforms into a party.

In a TripAdvisor review titled, "Is there a rating less than 'TERRIBLE'???" a soaker wrote that the "degenerates" at Umpqua were bathing with their dogs in the hot springs. Several others said they were harassed. One reviewer described a woman washing her dirty underwear in one of the pools before pouring beer into the water and throwing the empty can on the ground.

"When I went during the day it was perfect," she wrote. "Just [at] night is what turned me off."

Tyree said the Forest Service was responsible for cleaning up the mess, but not for enforcing the law. For that, he said, the agency calls upon the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, which routinely issues citations at the hot springs.

But because the springs are remote, and because Douglas County has only one deputy who patrols that area, enforcing the law at Umpqua Hot Springs is easier said than done.

"It's one of these areas that's remote and popular, and so it causes us problems because we get quite a few people who like to go there," said Dwes Hutson, public information officer for the Douglas County Sheriff's Office. "It's a challenge for us to police it."

The office has recorded 76 incidents related to the hot springs over the last 16 months, Hutson said, but that number doesn't include every call they get regarding the site.

The most common calls come in about missing people, who either hike up in the snow and get stuck, or go out for the night and don't return home. After that, car break-ins and "disturbances" are the most common issues deputies face.

The sheriff's office was most recently contacted on April 20, the day the camping ban was announced. A group of people were playing loud music and flashing bright lights, Hutson said, and when asked to turn the noise down, a man in the group pulled out a gun.

Since then, no citations have been issued to overnight campers, and there's no sign that future enforcement will be easy.

Cheryl Caplan, public affairs officer for the Umpqua National Forest, explained that rangers will routinely visit the hot springs to tell people not to camp, but said no new resources will be allocated to enforce the ban.

"What we have now that we lacked before was the authority to say 'you have to move on,'" Caplan said. "We're hopeful that they will gather their things and move on."

NOT UNCOMMON

The scene at Umpqua sounds extreme, but it's fairly routine in national forests.

"The issues that we've seen, the behavior that we've seen at the Umpqua Hot Springs is not uncommon," Glen Sachet, regional spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service, said. "[Hot springs] tend to attract what I think of as a care free kind of attitude and behavior."

Two other popular hot springs in the Cascades - Bagby Hot Springs and Terwilliger Hot Springs - have switched over to private management to quell similar issues.

Forest officials first instated a $3 fee to soak at Terwilliger in 1998, in an attempt to curb drug dealing, prostitution, sexual assault and even murder at the Willamette National Forest site. Some soakers complained the fee was discriminatory, but officials stuck to it, turning the hot springs over to a private concessionaire in 2005 to manage the site.

In 2002, the U.S. Forest Service increased enforcement at Bagby, after years of complaints about drug and alcohol use, off-leash dogs, car break-ins, rapes and assaults. Crime there decreased in the following years, but in 2012 the forest service turned to a private company to manage that site too, which summarily quashed all free-wheeling behavior - including nudity.

Now, it seems, Umpqua Hot Springs faces a similar destiny, though the U.S. Forest Service says it has no plans to find private concessionaires for the hot springs.

"Each of these sites are different, they have different populations, different people that visit them and they each require a different ... management approach," Sachet explained. "I would not generalize that there is any trend as far as how we manage hot springs."

The focus now, they say, is just to give the hot springs a break from all the use, to give forest officials a chance to clean it up. People can still visit from sunrise to sunset, but once dusk comes visitors are expected to pack out - preferably carrying what they packed in.

"We're just trying to make sure everybody gets a shot to enjoy themselves," Tyree said. "Let's give that a shot for a while, and see if we can get the vegetation to come back, see if we can get the area and that ecosystem to heal."

After a particularly rough few years, he said, Umpqua Hot Springs is ready for a break.

--Jamie Hale |

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