Glenwood Springs: Where the Utes Left Their Medicine

The canyon that frames Glenwood Springs is one of the most spectacular geological corridors in the American West, and for most of human history, it was a sacred place. The Ute people had been coming to the hot springs at the confluence of the Colorado and Roaring Fork rivers long before any European knew the continent existed. They called the largest of the springs Yampah, meaning Big Medicine in the Ute language, and the vapor caves adjacent to it were used for healing and ceremony. The springs produced water at temperatures between one hundred and one hundred twenty degrees, naturally mineralizing with sulfur, calcium, and sodium.

Anglo settlers arrived in the early eighteen eighties, shortly after the federal government forcibly removed the Utes from most of western Colorado following the Meeker Massacre of eighteen seventy-nine. Captain Isaac Cooper homesteaded the hot springs land in eighteen eighty-two and formed the Defiance Town and Land Company to develop it. His wife, homesick for their former home in Iowa, persuaded him to rename Defiance to Glenwood Springs.

The silver baron Walter Devereux bought the springs in eighteen eighty-five and began building in earnest: a red sandstone bathhouse, an outdoor hot springs pool that would become the largest in the world at two blocks long, and then the Hotel Colorado, which opened in eighteen ninety-three and drew the wealthy and famous to take the waters.

Glenwood Canyon itself, the twelve-mile gorge the Colorado River carved through Precambrian granite and limestone, was the last major section of Interstate Seventy to be completed. The highway through the canyon opened in October of nineteen ninety-two after twelve years of construction, an engineering project that required hanging roadway sections from canyon walls on steel brackets and drilling through solid granite in places where there was no room to lay pavement on the ground. It was the most expensive highway project in American history at the time.