bathing origins

“How’d you become inspired to make this happen?” I’m often asked. 

I typically tell the story of converting a woodshed into a sauna with a group of friends in 2012, pot of water on the stove, bathing weekly on Sunday night, then feasting with a core crew of young idealistic homesteaders, potluck style.

But the origin starts before then, at this place, or maybe another.

In 2009, 20-year old Jackie went backpacking with an acquaintance 20 years my senior, in the Sangre de Christo Mountains, southern Colorado. Plan was for him to leave early, a week later my boss would pick me at a certain mile marker at a certain time in the San Luis Valley, an arid desolate landscape that you could see 30mi clear across to the Rio Grande Mountains. No cell service, just stick to the plan.

The first night alone in the mountains, a bear visited my hammock. Next morning, I headed into the valley, tired and scared. This acquaintance mentioned something about a hot spring. I studied the map, found it, spent the day walking through arguably the most unregulated county in the US, past chained skeletons of pets, places where poverty, drugs, and isolation persist.

To a rustic hot spring “resort” built within an old mining camp, fueled by geothermal, designed and built out by the inventive engineering of a brilliant hippy decades prior. Nudity is allowed and encouraged in all spaces: the communal kitchen, the bunkhouse, the sauna, at the many natural pools carved into the hillside, on the 3-mile walk to the old mining cave, where at sunset, millions of bats pour out and fly overhead.

Over that week, I watched hundreds of Perseid meteors overhead at 3am, soaking in hot springs, deep in conversation with hot spring junkies, while milksnakes slithered by, deer and hares sipped mineral-rich water from the pools, and a spaceship was spotted overhead. I paid for the first day, and being totally broke, snuck into empty bunks or slithered into my sleeping back in the nearby oak scrub after dark. I went fly fishing in the mountains via horseback while camping at the ruins of a recent house fire, the air still thick with smoke, the horse’s tender living in the tack shed. Next day, I was guided by a native Navajo to a cave in which to shelter overnight from a rainstorm.

All these moments happened by showing up, being present, connecting, saying “yes”. I won’t understate: the risks involved in being a solo young adventurous woman were real and actualized, but so were the rewards.

I visited the hot spring many times in subsequent years, bumming and thumbing 250mi across Colorado, bringing loved ones to experience their essence: an oasis in which one can be warm and naked, feasting in the beauty of the gorgeous wild landscape.

Cedar Grove Sauna is created in the same spirit: being present, saying yes, taking risks, all in the name of creating a microclimate steeped in nautre within which we can reconnect.

This summer, like many before, I’m traveling to harvest bathing inspiration. This time, a 5 week road trip to visit hot springs in Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Colorado and Utah, in careful consideration of the next biggest project of Cedar Grove Sauna.  🪄