Basin Creek Road Campground

Some of the hot springs books and maps still in print refer to the Basin Creek Campground & hot spring. The campground was flooded and removed years ago. However, there's a narrow FS road going up the right side of Basin Creek with several nice, flat dispersed sites about 1/2 mile up. The road's a little narrow, with steep approaches, so I wouldn't take a big rig in. There's no point in going further up the road...we did so and found no campsites. We spent the night there in a teardrop and went down to the hot springs for a dip. The spring is at the edge of the creek below the rock formation, just as you leave the highway. There may be some blue tarps and hand-made rock soaking pools, depending on the time of year. In the fall the hot spring water was quite hot, and the creek water is quite cold, so it takes some thermal management. A short distance upriver on the highway is the parking area and changing room for Kem Hot Spring, a very hot pool on the edge of the Salmon River. In low water you need a bucket to cool it off with river water. We didn't even check for cell service at our camp. It's in a tight canyon, and I doubt there's any.

We drove up Basin Creek Road to explore camping in the area. If you look on maps you can see the first cul-de-sac area. That is the area we looked at. It is fairly flat. There might be a fire ring. There is scrub brush at the creek so no creek view. We did not find it appealing at all. It looked liked someone might have been living there in an old trailer. It felt a little sketchy. We decided not to stay. I hope it is ok to write a review if you explore a place and don’t spend the night. The road is narrow with no areas to pull off if you happen to meet another car.

We took a little scouting trip up here. Pretty cool area although the road is quite narrow and looks as though it could be washed away in places with a little rain. We would take our 21' Class B up here but wouldn't consider any sort of trailer, at least for us. There are a couple widely spaced pull outs on the way up but if you met someone, one of you would probably have to back up a bit....

The old, abandoned campground area is pretty cool. It sits right next to the creek which was raging while we were there in mid June. Rumor has it there is a hot spring by site 4 but the creek was way too high and we weren't able to find anything

There is a fire pit and picnic table at each site and the pit toilet there was actually open.

No one around when we were there. No cell phone signal but with the open sky pretty, Starlink would probably be a good option!