Mount Princeton Hot Springs: The Vanished Grand Hotel

Up Chalk Creek Canyon, south of Buena Vista near the little settlement of Nathrop, hot mineral water pours out of the ground at the foot of Mount Princeton, and people have been soaking in it for as long as anyone can trace. The Ute people used these springs for healing long before any settler arrived. In the eighteen sixties a surveyor named Heywood took eight hundred twenty acres around the springs as payment for surveying work and opened a stage stop called the Heywood Hot Springs House, with a bathhouse dating to about eighteen sixty seven.

Then the mining boom found it. Investors tied to the Mary Murphy Mine, the big gold producer up the canyon, bought the springs and in eighteen eighty three opened the Antero Hotel, a fifty room resort for the silver era's new money. Around nineteen fifteen it was expanded into a hundred room palace with tall towers and a grand ballroom, one of the showpiece resorts of the Rockies.

Guests arrived by rail up the canyon. That was the problem. The railroad pulled out in the nineteen twenties, the Depression followed, and the great hotel never really recovered.

In the nineteen fifties investors from Texas bought the property and demolished the grand hotel entirely, an ending that still makes local historians wince. The springs never stopped flowing. The resort was rebuilt and restored in the two thousands, and today you can soak in rock pools in Chalk Creek itself, steam rising off the water where Ute families, stage passengers, and silver millionaires all soaked before you.