Bridgeport Buckeye Hot Springs, near Bridgeport, California. A stop on the way home from Burning Man.
After Burning Man 2003, I took the scenic route home and stopped at the Bridgeport hot springs.
The springs are a short hike from the road in the Bodie Hills east of Bridgeport. The water comes out of the ground at high temperature and cools in pools before reaching the creek. Nobody built them — they’re just there, out in the desert hills, and people stop. You get in and soak the playa dust out and the long drive back to reality is slightly more bearable.
I’ve stopped here on other post-burn drives. It’s become part of the ritual. Burning Man ends when the Man burns and everyone starts moving toward the exit gates. But the decompression happens on the road — in the hot springs, over breakfast in a small town, in the long drive through the Owens Valley where the Sierra Nevada is on your left and the White Mountains are on your right and the scale of both makes everything that just happened seem both more and less significant.