Rebirth at Gila Hot Springs

By M. John Fayhee

Jim Ransom got his riverside camper trailer out by the skin of his chinny-chin-chin as the water was rising fast up to chest level. It was the morning of Sunday, January 27, and it had been raining most of the night. That would have likely been cool, except that 30 miles upstream from the hamlet of Gila Hot Springs, New Mexico, where Ransom has lived for seven years, the rain combined with unseasonably warm temperatures to melt the snowpack in the Mogollon Mountains — at almost 11,00 feet, the highest range in the area. It is in the Mogollons that the headwaters for two of the three branches — the Middle Fork and the West Fork — of the Gila River are found. All told, in less than a day, an inch-and-a-quarter of rain fell, which is a lot in country where precipitation is more likely to run off than to soak in. Combine that with a winter’s worth of snowpack suddenly achieving liquid form, and trouble was suddenly spelled with a capital “T.”

The National Park Service employees at the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, four miles upriver from Gila Hot Springs, had already received word from the National Weather Service to expect high water on the Gila River. No one knew just how high.

“We were told it could be big, so we needed to be ready,” says Sonya Berger, chief of interpretation at the Cliff Dwellings.

Within a few hours, the West Fork of the Gila, which is normally less than two feet deep as it passes the Cliff Dwellings, rose seven feet, resulting in a torrent almost as deep as a basketball goal is high. The nearby Middle Fork rose almost as much. And both of those forks join together just up from Gila Hot Springs.

By the time the flood reached Gila Hot Springs, there was a wall of very fast-moving water eight feet deep in a flood plain that is normally bone dry.

“It’s amazing that no one got hurt,” Berger says. “We had a couple campers at the monument who were stranded for a day on the wrong side of the river, but no one was injured.”

But there was damage. The venerable West Fork and Middle Fork trails, two of the most popular backpacking destinations in this part of the state (because they form a 25-mile loop and because they access several sets of backcountry hot springs), were devastated and will require years of work before the tread is fully restored.

And the hot springs pools that Ransom oversees were washed away.

It would have been easy for Ransom to throw his hands up in abject despair once the waters receded. After all, he had been working for many years to mold the Gila Hot Springs into something far more than a sum of its soaking-pool parts. Ransom, like many New Mexicans, has artistic creativity coursing through his inner being. The Gila Hot Springs were adorned from one end to the other with some of the coolest and most serendipitous found art imaginable. Ransom had developed a much-deserved reputation in this art-intense part of the world for his perceptive creations. Whenever Ransom comes up with something new, people drive up from Silver City just to check his latest creations out.

All that work spanning all those years was for the most part washed downriver in a matter of minutes. Many people would have been distraught, or, failing that, at least somewhat disoriented and/or deflated. But Ransom smiled at the thought of having to start over.

“I was getting tired of maintaining and of tweaking,” he told my wife and I just as he was just beginning the process of recreating his wonderful little kingdom of creativity. “I had been thinking for a while about how to clean things out and start over. And then the flood came and took care of it.”

The first part of the restoration process was the reestablishment of the soaking pools. The springs are a for-profit business, charging $3 a person for a soak and $4 a person for overnight camping. So, Ransom had to get the business part of the business up and running ASAP. He was delighted by the possibilities. With a clean canvass upon which to work, he redesigned a pool layout that had not changed in years. Whereas there used to be two pools, close to each other and out in the open, now there are three, and each is far more private. The output of the hot springs themselves was not affected by the flood. That output remained constant at about 150 gallons a minute with a consistent source temperature of about 130 degrees. (The pools themselves are about 105 degrees.)

Once the new pools were excavated and lined, the process of rebirthing the artistic funkiness factor commenced. Fortunately, a few of Ransom’s creations remained, and he clustered them in a “survivor’s garden.” Then he began searching the surrounding area for new future pieces of artistic enterprise. He knows it will take a while to fully reincarnate his environment, but Ransom seems happy to have the opportunity to do so.

It is one of my great hopes that everyone in the world has that one special spot that is his or her very favorite among all the special spots in the world. For some, it may be a certain museum, or a certain ski run, or a certain barstool. For more than 30 years, my favorite single place on the planet has been Gila Hot Springs. I was shocked almost to tears when I first observed the power of Mother Nature in this context. Like most people, the word “destruction” came to mind. Because of Ransom, though, I have been able to get past that and to realize, as we all should from time to time, just how important change, even radical change, is.