The Spring That Named a Town

The name Steamboat Springs comes from a sound that no one alive today has ever heard. Somewhere beneath what is now the town's downtown district, there once existed an intermittent thermal spring whose eruptions produced a rhythmic, chugging noise that early visitors compared to the sound of a river steamboat's engine, the deep mechanical thrum that marked commerce and connection in the era before railroads reached the Rocky Mountain West.

Early fur trappers working the Yampa Valley are credited with naming the area for that spring. They followed the Yampa, hunting beaver for the pelt trade that drove the early Rocky Mountain economy, and they camped near the distinctive chuffing spring that punctuated the valley's quiet. The name stuck.

The original spring is long gone. It cannot be visited today. Steamboat Springs itself remains geothermally rich, however. The Strawberry Park Hot Springs, north of town, and smaller mineral springs along the Yampa River still draw visitors. These are gentler, quieter springs than the noisy ancestor that named the town, but they are fed by the same deep heat, the same volcanic energy that has warmed the Yampa Valley's surface for as long as anyone has recorded.

The Yamparika Ute, who lived in this valley for generations before Euro-American contact, knew the springs well and used them. It was the fur trappers who heard a machine in the earth's breathing and decided it sounded like the boats they had left behind.