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Taking the Waters
by Joanne Ditmer

Reprinted with permission from the March 3, 1996 Edition of the Denver Post.

Pagosa Springs - It's a night of high theater. Great drifting swirls of silvery steam and incandescent vapor languidly twine around a cluster of pools nestled against the hillside, obscuring them one moment, parting to allow a glimpse the next. Occasionally muted laughter is heard, and the glittering stars overhead fleetingly appear as the veils of steam whirl.

Even though it's nearing midnight, there are a dozen or so people scattered among the 11 mineral pools filled from natural hot springs. A pair of lovers cuddles in one, talking quietly and looking through the steam to the tumbling river, while at the other end two businessmen discuss the day's calls. In another pool, a quartet from across the county attending a holistic medicine conference animatedly recounts high points from the lectures they heard that day. The four praise the water's power to rejuvenate weary spirits and the way the pools are set on the hillside.

The geothermal water entering each pool and the rushing San Juan River nearby give each pool's conversation privacy. It's a time of languorous indulgence, soothing serenity and a definite sense of being far removed from life's daily traumas.

Early the next morning, Chris Powe and her 7-month-old son, Walker, play leisurely in a hot pool, the mother dipping the delighted baby up and down and moving through the water.

"I had a knee injury, and the waters really have helped the healing," Powe said. "I try to time it so the first half the baby plays, then I put him in his carrier to sleep, and I come back to the water." In a neighboring pool, a young man suffering from a horrendous cold - "I think it's pneumonia," said a glum Rusty LaRue of Hood River, Ore. - sat miserable but hopeful of "baking out" his affliction.

The pools have ledges where bathers can sit, but most hang out on the outer edge, looking across the river, to town. The water is chesthigh or shallower.

It comes from The Great Pagosa Springs, ballyhooed for over a century as the largest and hottest known geothermal pool in the world. The Spring Inn, where these outdoor pools are located and heat for seven public buildings and a few private customers.

The water temperature ranges from 135 to 153 degrees, but the depth of the springs is still unknown.

"That's partly because the pressure of the water rising to the surface makes it impossible to put a weight down to accurately measure the depth," explained Matt Mees, owner of The Spring Inn. Mees has lived and worked construction in Pagosa for 18 years. He bought the inn, a boarded-up, 23-room motel between the Great Pagosa Springs and the San Juan River in 1990, and began to redesign its hot springs to be more attractive - and profitable. Out went the four plastic pools discolored by and encrusted with minerals. In came a series of oblong or rounded outdoor soaking pools of concrete lined with fiberglass nestled against the hillside like lichen layered on a tree. Temperatures vary in each pool, from 98 to 114 degrees, as the mineral waters descend to the tumbling river. The hardiest souls soak in the hottest pool, dip in the frigid San Juan, and then return to the steaming waters.

"I don't have an architect plan the pools. I just sit here and muse where the next one goes," Mees said at breakfast at the restaurant across the river. The corner window gives a splendid view of the clustering pools veiled in a fantasy of swirling steam on a winter morning.

With shoulder-length graying hair flowing loosely, and neatly trimmed beard and mustache, the casually dressed Mees belies and initial hippie image as he discusses future plans with a decided sense of purpose and enthusiasm. He plans to add three or four pools a year for the next several years. The current ones bear such names as Lobster Pot, Waterfall pool and River pool, and are connected by flagstone paths. The water turns over in the smaller pools about every 20 minutes; in the largest about every two hours. Late last year he installed geothermally treated handrails, so bathers don't freeze their fingers when they grasp the rails in cold weather.

Mees is particularly proud of the bridge he built across one large, shallow pool where bathing is not permitted. The bridge dips into the water so you wade when you cross it. "It's our one chance in life to walk on water," Mees joked.

The spring water is laden with minerals: Mees believes the hot spring has the highest concentration of sulfate of any springs in the nation. At the top of the pool complex there is a mounded dome about 6 feet tall, and that wide across, of pale green, gray, tan and rosy pink mineral deposits. Below it, through the centuries, the minerals have formed a cliff of travertine where the pools are located.

"It's a major thing to maintain the system. We have 2 miles of pipes, and something's always breaking down," Mees said. "Three days a week we drain the pools and pressure-wash them. We've found that keeping the water enclosed and moving in the pipes, we have less trouble with mineral deposits clogging. We heat the motel with the hot springs water because that cools the water enough so we can put it in the pools." The majority of the visitors are from Colorado, and it's not unusual for them to plan to stop one night, and then to cancel out the rest of the trip and stay all week.

Many visitors credit the healing powers of the mineral springs, but Mees is more cautions: "You can't spend a night and get well... but you can spend a night and feel better." Across the way at The Spa Motel, with three hot water wells on the property, Marsha Preuit got in the hot springs business because of its healing power. Her parents, Mike and Nancy Giordano, bought The Spa, the town's oldest commercial public baths, while he was still a coal miner, and when many miners soaked in the big pool.

Then, in 1975, a horse fell on Mike Giordano and he was told he would never walk again. Hospitalized four months, and in a body cast three months, he began to go into the springs daily, and eventually not only walked, but began to ride his horse again.

"I think that's when the orthopod began to refer patients here," Preuit said. With increased interest in holistic living, many families come every year, stay a week and may take the baths two and three times a day, she added. There are also German, French, Swiss and Italian visitors. Preuit took over the business in 1981.

The third major user of the hot springs water is the town. It is reportedly one of only eight geothermal systems in operation in the country, and the first city-owned and operated system. The system went on-line in the early 80s and is priced at 30 percent below natural gas rates.

Jay Harrington, town administrator, said the hot mineral water is sent through stainless steel heat exchangers, and the resulting heat warms the courthouse, town hall, three schools, two churches and a few private customers.

Pagosa Springs, like other Western Slope communities, is having a growth spurt, and there is considerable concern over how much additional usage can be accommodated without threatening the existing system and users.

Governing hot springs water gets a little complicated, said Reiner Haubold, a state engineer with the Division of Water Resources. If it is a surface spring, and the water is captured and used on its way to stream, it is governed by Western water rights laws - the first to record use has first priority. But if it is a ground spring, and a well is needed to get the water, then a well permit is needed, and may be denied. When an aquifer is depleted it doesn't matter what the regulations say.

In Ouray, for example, the town decided in 1989 it needed more hot water to keep the city pool open in the winter. Some experimental wells were drilled near the Wiesbaden Hot Springs Spa and Lodging. The new drilling damaged the flow, and though it was capped, the original flow has never been regained, spa owner Linda Mitner said.

Native Americans, who first used the hot springs across this nation, appreciated them for their healing and cleansing properties. The springs were considered a gift from the gods and sometimes were even neutral ground for warring tribes.

Capt. John N. Macomb, a topographical engineer surveying a route west for the U.S. Army in 1858, was the first white man to see The Great Pagosa Springs and he predicted it would become a celebrated resort. The surface site of the Great Pagosa Springs is an unassuming place today, a shallow saucer of uninviting mossy and brownish water rimmed by a tall fence. A Ute legend says that many years ago a terrible plague was killing Utes, and the medicine men had no cures. A tribal council gathered on the banks of the San Juan River. There they built a huge bonfire to send a message to the gods for help, and then danced and prayed for hours, until exhausted, they fell to the ground, and slept. On awakening, they found that the fire had burned down, and in its place was a pond of boiling water. The Utes drank the water and bathed in it, and they were cured.

When the Victorians discovered the mineral and hot springs, they copied the European "spa" approach to their use. People traveled long distances, and stayed days or weeks to "take the waters" and enjoy their healing powers. Resorts sprang up around the springs. Once train tracks were laid to Colorado in 1870, it wasn't unusual for people to come from the East, perhaps to Glenwood or Manitou Springs, or other celebrated spas.

Colorado has more than 90 hot springs, some bubbling away in remote meadows, others surrounded by commercial development. Five major springs are located in southwest Colorado, more than any other region in the state. They include the city of Ouray Hot Springs Pool; Trimble Hot Springs, 6 miles north of Durango; Orvis Hot Springs just south of Ridgway; and Waunita Hot Springs and Lodge east of Gunnison.

At least in this territory, when you're in hot water, you're not in trouble, but in sumptuous bliss.

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