Inn & Marcantile at Ojo Caliente

The little, six-room B&B just outside the gate of the main spa is a real favorite. The rooms are comfortable and free of TV. No other appliances either, but guests are welcome to use the adjacent kitchen, which has everything. Pleasant indoor and outdoor sitting and breakfast tables.

The breakfast is really fine. Deserves to be called gourmet, because much is home-grown as well as home-made. It's different every day, and personally prepared by a friendly staff - and sometimes by the owners. These two ladies have been here for a long time - as I can attest from frequent stays. This time I learned from one of them that the little fruits on the counter were not grapes, but plums. indigenous, pre-Colombian plums, which she has cultivated and turned into jams and syrup of gluten-free pancakes. Then there were her peaches. Maybe not indigenous, but really delicious, grown in her own orchard.  The small peaches - like wild strawberries - gain in flavor what they lack in dimension. Best I have ever tasted, I think.

To top it off,, there is a lively, old, adobe church right across the street. 

San Luis and Rabbit Brush

The San Luis Valley is a high (almost 8,000 feet) park between the San Juan and the Sangre de Cristo ranges, where the Rio Grande rises. It is amed for the little town near the New Mexico border, which is the oldest in Colorado. I drove so9uth from Salida Springs through this kind of landscape:

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Rabbit Brush is in full bloom this time of year, turning the valley floor gold.

The Sangre de Cristo are my favotrite mo9untains, stretching from SantaFe on the southern end north to this vallet. The main Co9lorado peak is called Blanca because itis often white from top to the vallet floor. Not now, though. Bare because of little precipitation, although there was a smattering that turned it white for me in the afternoon.

I think Blanca is my favorite mountain. For me, it marks the furthest extent of the Spanish Empire in the new world. .It is also the highest of the range, at 14, 344 feet:

The Spanish neer settled the area, though. They set it aside for the Ute people. AFter we took it from the Mesxicans in 1848, farmers, the Utes were driven away and Spanish farmers from further so9uth were recruited. San Luis was incorporated in 1851. This was also the time of the arrival of the first RC Bishop  of Santa Fe, Jean Baptiste Lamy who founded a number of parishes (San Acacio, San Antonito, San Luis, San Pedro y Pablo), which still have hamlets named for them. Lamy came from Clermont-Ferrand via Cincinnati. Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop is based on his ministry. Until then, the nearest bishop was in Chihuahua, and things got a little rough in New Mexico



Virgo de San Acacio - oldest church in Colorado.

Among other things, there arose a society of flagellants called penitentes, which Lamy tried to supress - unsu8ccessfully. They went undergro9und until they were later reconciled, agreeing to tone down some of their practices.  Their muradas, windowless meeting halls, are still to be seen.

The San Luis Valley is also home to a society called S.P.M.D.T.U., a Hispanic labor union founded in 1900 and still going.

At one poinbt while exploring these towns, I had to stop for a herd of cows, driven by cowboys and cowgirls on ATVs!

Then on to Ojo Caliente, named by the first European to see it, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca in 1536. He had been shipwrecked in Florida, and somehow made his way to New Mexico! When he arrived, the spring was already sacred to the Indians. [There is a pretty good eponymous  movie about this. The Indians 0of Ojo Caliente look like lepers, because of their salutary habit of mud-bathing.]

Now, Ojo Caliente is a fancy spa, with several different kinds of mineral bathsk, icluding iron and soda (magnesium) the oldest, arsenic, and lithium,, in addition to llarge heated pools. Mud bathing is still offered. All with the pleasant aroma of pinon from the fireplaces in the air.

 Arsenic pool at Ojo Caliente

So, the sun has come out, and it iis time to bathe!

A big cloudburst with lightning shut down the outdoor baths - they are afraid of lightening, I guess. I had  more than two hours of soaking, though and that it enough for today.

North Platte to Boulder to Salida Springs.

The scenery changed abruptly at the Colorado border, from woods along the river to high plains barren. Got to Boulder early and spent the afternoon with the deRaismes. Rick Moody came over to talk for awhile and it was moist enjoyable.

I went on to Idaho Springs for a soak in the old spa there, and a restful night. Then off this morning through Breckenridge and over Hoosier Pass (>11,000 ft). VERY slowly because of a big semi and no passing on the road. OK with me - more time to observe the scenery, including a view of Pike's peak on the descent.. Slight giddiness from the altitude.

No room in Buena Vista, so I went on to Salida, where there is a nice spa and indoor pool. So I will skip Mt. Princeton and go on to Ojo Caliente tomorrow, I think. Labor Day weekend may be causing a problem with rooms.

Aspens are turning - some in full bloom.

The Baths of New Mexico and Colorado

[This was to have been posted in the Winter of 1917, but I didn't, for some reason. My new posts begin with the one previous to this, and then continue, as I write them.]

Having neglected this log for three years, I find that I now want to record the delights of a trip up the Rio Grande in search of hot springs.


Pagosa Springs

In the San Juan Mountains, along the eponymous river (a tributary of the Colorado, which joins it above the Grand Canyon) that is just as wide as the Rio Grande, a town grew up around a hot spring beside the river, named after the nearby Pagosa peak., When the spa was quite humble. Now there is more than one to choose from, and all are quite luxurious.

I remember the old one, which I visited yesterday, was just one indoor hot pool, with a tiny, long, rectangular room through which hot water was piped so as to produce a steam bath. After getting hot enough, it was possible to run across the parking lot and jump into the San Juan! You can do that anymore, but right across the street, there is a new spa with lots of outdoor pools and steps leading right down into the river. The hottest pool is 110° and the river must be below 40°. That makes for a nice and/or fun-rash and wonderful, skin-tingling sense of healthy well-being. I suppose some might question my doing this at 74, but if it kills me at least I will have died happy! The euphoria of lying, in my bathing suit, in the sun, at 7400 feet, having just climbed out of that river, inches away, is not to be forgotten.

With three people from Fort Worth. I told them all about truth or consequences. Then another, older man joined us and somehow the conversation turned to our halfwit President. I just listened for quite a while, but finally — as in one of the psalms — I could hold my tongue no longer. I asked them to listen what I told him what it was like in Minnesota. Our Somali people are fleeing to Canada. How immigrants are afraid to go to a parent-teacher conferences, because they might be disappeared. How the Halfwit stopped at our airport a week or so before the election just to threaten the Somali community.

This was my first — and so far my only — direct contact with Halfwit-supporters. What is really frightening about it was a personal confirmation of what we've been hearing on the news: people simply have contradictory views of reality — alternative realities. The major media are all liars — exactly, I have to observe, what I think of people like Rush Limbaugh and the Halfwit himself. The older man fears there may be a civil war. This conversation somewhat marred my euphoric reveries in this otherwise lovely place.

I did not remind them that Colorado was a blue state.

It is amazing to me that I haven't visited this site for four years! Anyway, thanks for your interest,, and I will try to post something every day or so. For now, here is a picture of a Sand Hill Crane, of which population North Platte Nebraska claims to be the capitol: