The water bubbles hot from the land and sunlight filters through the branches of the towering oak trees.
But before you can soak in the wildly popular Montecito Hot Springs in Santa Barbara County, you'll have to hike a little over a mile uphill, weaving your way through rocks, oak trees, and a meandering stream. And before the hike, there are two more crucial steps: getting to the trailhead and knowing what to expect.
The trail to the Montecito hot springs.
These rustic spring pools are about 95 miles northwest of Los Angeles City Hall, just uphill from wealthy Montecito, whose residents include Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Although the trail and hot springs are part of the Los Padres National Forest, the trailhead is in a residential neighborhood of gated mansions. Beyond the trailhead parking area (which has room for eight or nine cars), the neighborhood includes very little sidewalk parking. After visitation increased during the pandemic, county officials accused some neighbors of placing rocks to obstruct public parking. Parking options were further reduced when county officials additional parking restrictions earlier this year.
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Bottom line: Unless you can get there on a weekday between 8 and 10 am, you're probably better off taking a rideshare service to get there. Whenever you arrive, you'll likely have company. And you may want to wait until the landscape dries out a bit from the rains of the last few weeks.
As Los Padres National Forest spokesman Andrew Madsen warned, “the Santa Barbara foothills are especially fragile and hiking is especially precarious after heavy rains.”
All that said, the hike is rewarding and free. From the Hot Springs Canyon trailhead at East Mountain Drive and Riven Rock Road, it is a 2.5-mile round-trip trail to the hot springs, with about 800 feet of elevation gain along the way.
Arriving at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, I snagged the last parking spot at the trailhead, walked past signs prohibiting parking before 8 a.m. or after sunset, then passed another sign warning that “this is a challenging and hilly hike.” Additionally, there are no bathrooms or trash cans on the trail or at the springs.
“It's important for people to know what's going on there before they show up,” Madsen said. “It's not that glamorous.”
Although the hot springs are only 1.2 or 1.3 miles away, plan on about an hour of uphill hiking. Once you're above the residential lots, you'll see pipes along the road carrying water down the hill, along with occasional poison oak trees next to the trail. As you approach the pools, you will smell sulfur and notice that the water takes on a strange bluish tone. The trail then crosses the stream, which I initially missed.
But there was a positive side. That detour gave me the opportunity to admire the stone ruins of a hotel built next to the springs in the 1870s. After a fire, it was converted into a private club. Then it burned in the 1964 coyote firethat blackened more than 65,000 acres, destroyed more than 90 homes and killed one firefighter. The hot springs and surrounding lands have been part of the Los Padres National Forest since 2013.
Hikers look west from the ruins near Montecito Hot Springs.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
On a clear day with the sun in the right place, you can stand among the overgrown ruins, look west, and see the ocean, some old oil platforms, and the long, low silhouette of Santa Cruz Island. This is what the native Chumash would have seen (minus the oil rigs) during the many years they used the springs before European immigrants arrived.
As nice as that view was, I was ready to dive in, as were the two couples who were momentarily lost with me. (We were all newbies to Montecito Hot Springs). Once we retraced our steps to the creek and crossed it, the trail quickly took us past a handwritten CLOTHING OPTIONAL sign toward a series of spring-fed pools of varying temperatures.
A dozen people were already lounging in and around the upper pools (a topless woman, a bottomless man), but several pools remained empty. I took one that was about 2 feet deep and maybe 90 degrees. At a pool near me were Ryan Binter, 30, and Kyra Rubinstein, 26, both from Wichita, Kansas.
Hikers Ryan Binter and Kyra Rubinstein, visiting from Wichita, Kansas, take a dip at Montecito Hot Springs.
(Christopher Reynolds/Los Angeles Times)
“He found this,” Binter said, praising Rubinstein's ability to conduct Internet searches.
In the next pool were Emanuel León, 20, of Carpinteria, California, and Evelyn Torres, 19, of Santa Barbara. The last time they attempted this hike, they went off the trail and missed the hot springs, so this time they were savoring the scene.
“Revenge!” Leon said, settling down.
The swim was so smooth, quiet and unhurried that I was surprised to learn that the pools had not been built legally. As Madsen of the Los Padres National Forest later explained by phone, they were “created by trail gnomes”: hikers who arranged rocks themselves to adjust water flow and temperature, with no government entity involved.
Legal or not, they got a nice reward after the uphill trek. The downhill hike was easier and faster, of course, but it was still tricky due to the rocks and winding trail.
When leaving Montecito, especially if it's your first time, take a good look at the adobe-style grandeur of the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church building, which appears to have been smuggled into California from Santa Fe. For food and drink, head to Coast Village Road (the community's main street) or the Montecito Village shopping center on East Valley Road. Those shops and restaurants may not match the wonder and comfort of a natural forest swim, but for civilization, they're no bad thing.
