Sol Duc Hot Springs: From Dragon Legend to Timber Baron's Resort

The name Sol Duc comes from a Quileute word for sparkling water, mispronounced by early settlers until the original sound was lost. The springs themselves, tucked in a valley in the mountains east of Forks, were known to local indigenous people for their therapeutic value long before any non-Native person reached them.

The first non-Indian to visit the springs reportedly did so as an act of reciprocity. In the early eighteen eighties, a settler named Theodore Moritz encountered a Quileute man in difficulty on the river and helped him. In gratitude, the man led Moritz to the hot springs, whose waters bubble out of the earth at temperatures between one hundred nine and one hundred fourteen degrees.

In nineteen twelve, a timber baron named Michael Earles opened an elaborate resort at Sol Duc that had cost him more than half a million dollars. The complex included a one-hundred-sixty-five-room four-star hotel, a sanatorium, a bathhouse, a gymnasium, golf links, tennis courts, and croquet grounds. It was among the most ambitious resort developments in the Pacific Northwest at the time. Four years later, in May of nineteen sixteen, sparks from a defective chimney set the shingle roof on fire. A strong wind spread the flames, and within three hours the hotel and most of the complex were destroyed.

The indigenous legend of the springs tells of two dragons who lived in separate valleys and did not know the other existed until they met on a ridge and fought. Neither could defeat the other. They returned to their valleys and wept, and their tears became the hot springs. The National Park Service concession at Sol Duc today is a more modest operation than Earles envisioned, but the water still rises from the earth at the same temperatures it always has.