Dunton Hot Springs

Miners came up the West Fork of the Dolores River in the 1880s looking for silver and built a camp of log cabins in a meadow beside a hot spring. Dunton Hot Springs, reached by road from Dolores in south-western Colorado, is that camp, restored cabin by cabin and run since 2001 as a small resort in a high valley of the San Juan Mountains.

History

Dunton grew up around its mines in the late nineteenth century and never became much more than a cluster of cabins, a saloon, a dance hall and a bathhouse over the spring. When the mining faded the town emptied, though the hot water kept drawing visitors through the twentieth century, some of them a rough crowd. In 1994 Bernt Kuhlmann and Christoph Henkel bought the whole town. They spent years restoring it, lifting cabins, replacing rotten logs and adding plumbing and heat without changing the outlines of the buildings, and Dunton opened to guests in 2001. A local story holds that Butch Cassidy, who robbed a bank in nearby Telluride in 1889, carved his name into the saloon's bar.

Architecture and design

The town keeps its nineteenth-century layout: log cabins scattered around the meadow, the saloon and dance hall at its heart, the bathhouse over the spring. The restoration kept the hand-hewn logs and rough timber and furnished the interiors with antiques, rugs and textiles gathered from many countries, so that each cabin has a character of its own. Aspen forest and steep slopes close the valley on every side, and the West Fork runs past the cabins.

Rooms and suites

The cabins vary in size, some suited to a couple and others to a family, and some have hot spring tubs of their own. Down the valley, Dunton River Camp offers a handful of canvas tents on platforms beside the river, run on the same lines for guests who want to be closer to the water.

Dining

Meals are taken in the saloon and dance hall, where the kitchen cooks set menus from local and garden produce, served at shared tables. The bar is the old saloon bar, and evenings tend to end there, around the stove, with guests who were strangers at breakfast.

Wellness

The springs are the reason the town existed. Mineral water rises warm from the ground and fills several pools: in the bathhouse, outdoors in the meadow and in some of the cabins. Massage and other treatments are offered, along with yoga. In summer guests ride, hike, fly-fish the river and walk into the high country; in winter, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing and heli-skiing in the surrounding peaks replace them.

Weddings and events

The whole town can be booked for a single party, which is how most weddings here take place. Ceremonies are held in the meadow or in the old dance hall, and the small number of cabins keeps guest lists short. Companies use the town the same way for retreats, taking every cabin for a few days.

Location

Dunton lies in the San Juan National Forest, on a road partly unpaved, at the end of a valley below the peaks of the Lizard Head Wilderness. Telluride is the nearest town of any size, over Lizard Head Pass, and its small airport is the closest; Durango and Cortez have airports within reach for connecting flights. Mesa Verde National Park, with its Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings, makes a day trip to the south-west. Few places that could be called a luxury hotel in the San Juan Mountains are this remote, and that remoteness is what guests come for.