Woodside: The Cold Water Geyser of the Desert

Woodside, Utah, is a near-ghost on the western edge of the Book Cliffs, but it holds one genuine curiosity: a cold water geyser that erupts spontaneously from an old drill hole sunk in the eighteen eighties. The geyser is not heated by geothermal energy but driven by dissolved carbon dioxide gas that comes out of solution as the water rises and depressurizes, much like opening a bottle of soda. The result is an intermittent eruption of cold, slightly fizzy water rising several feet into the air in the middle of the desert.

Woodside itself was a Denver and Rio Grande Western railroad stop established in eighteen eighty-one, and it once had a post office, a school, and a small community of ranchers and railroad workers. The population has dwindled to a handful of residents. The geyser, one of only a few natural cold water geysers in the United States, draws occasional visitors off Interstate Seventy.