Pagosa Springs
Built Around The Mother Spring, Listed By Guinness As The Deepest Geothermal Hot Spring In The World Probed To Over A Thousand Feet Without Reaching The Bottom. The Name Comes From The Ute Word Pagosah, Healing Waters. · Pagosa Springs, Colorado
The Ute called this place Pagosah, healing waters, and they were not describing a modest spring. The Mother Spring at Pagosa Springs has been probed to more than a thousand feet without anyone finding the bottom, which is why Guinness lists it as the deepest geothermal hot spring in the world. It surfaces at scalding temperatures in the middle of a small San Juan mountain town and is cooled into terraced pools that step down the bank of the San Juan River, so you can sit in hot mineral water with cold snowmelt running past a few feet away. Above the town, Wolf Creek Pass takes the heaviest snowfall in Colorado - over four hundred inches in a good year - which gives the place a ski area with genuinely deep snow and almost no lift queues. Twenty minutes west sits Chimney Rock National Monument, and the San Juan River runs straight through the middle of the town past the pools, so the local ritual is to move between hot mineral water and cold snowmelt until you cannot tell which is which any more.
San Juan Street, Pagosa Springs, Colorado, 81147, United States
A year-round town. The commercial soaking resorts are open daily, typically from early morning until late evening, and are busiest at weekends and over holidays. There are informal free soaking spots along the river bank whose availability changes with river levels and is not guaranteed. WOLF CREEK PASS CAN CLOSE IN WINTER STORMS and is the main route east. Wolf Creek Ski Area runs roughly November to early April. Chimney Rock National Monument, twenty minutes west, is seasonal and closed all winter.