Mount Princeton Hot Springs

Hot Springs In The Bed Of Chalk Creek Beneath The Chalk Cliffs, Where Geothermal Water Seeps Up Through The Gravel And Visitors Build Their Own Rock Pools Against The Cold Creek. A Resort Has Operated On The Site Since The 1870s. · Nathrop, Colorado

The thing that makes Mount Princeton different from every other Colorado hot spring is that part of it is not a pool at all. Geothermal water seeps up through the gravel bed of Chalk Creek, and people wade in, stack rocks into a wall, and build their own soaking pool where the hot seep meets the cold snowmelt - adjusting the wall until the mix is right. Above it stand the Chalk Cliffs, which are not chalk but granite hydrothermally rotted to white clay by the same system that heats the water, with the 14,197-foot summit of Mount Princeton behind. There is a conventional resort on the bank too, with a bathhouse and terraced pools, and a historic hotel that has operated here in some form since the 1870s, with terraced pools and a bathhouse on the bank. But the creek is the reason to come, and it only works when the water is low enough to build in - which rules out the whole of the late-spring snowmelt.

15870 County Road 162, Nathrop, Colorado, 81236, United States

Open year-round, with the resort pools operating daily from morning until evening and the creek soaking area available to day visitors and guests. THE CREEK POOLS DEPEND ENTIRELY ON WATER LEVEL - at high snowmelt in late spring the creek runs too high and cold to build pools in, and they are best from midsummer through autumn and in winter. Chalk Creek Canyon road continues to St. Elmo and is seasonal above the resort. The Agnes Vaille Falls trail has been closed since a fatal rockslide in 2013.

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