Walley’s Hot Springs

David Walley opened his resort around the geothermal springs here in 1862, and people have been soaking in the hot mineral water ever since. In an era when a mineral bath counted as medicine, the springs drew Comstock money and Carson Valley locals alike to the foot of the Sierra. Mark Twain was among the visitors, claiming the heated waters left him relieved of pain and restored in spirit. The resort outlasted the silver towns that first filled its baths and still operates as a hot-springs retreat below Genoa, one of Nevada's oldest.

What the plaque says

Like many Nevada hot springs, these dot a fault break along which the mountains rise. In 1862, along this Carson branch of the Emigrant Trail, David and Harriet Walley developed a $100,000 spa with 11 baths, a ballroom and gardens. The thermal waters (136˚ to 160˚) became well known as a cure of "rheumatism and scrofulous affections". It sold for a mere $5,000 in 1896, but functioned as a hotel until 1935 when it burned. Its former cool cellar you see is still in use. In 1962, trial hydro-thermal power poles were drilled here as deep as 1,250': Maximum temperature 181˚.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Genoa — 1.7 mi
  Nevada's oldest town—a California Trail trading post and Carson Valley ranch country that came eight years before the silver and quietly outlasted it
• Cave Rock / De'ek Wadapush — 7.6 mi
  One of the most sacred places of the Wašiw—the Standing Gray Rock, a worn volcano the highway was blasted through and climbers bolted for sport, now closed and quiet again after the Washoe's long fight to protect it
• Glenbrook & Spooner Summit — 9.2 mi
  Lake Tahoe's east shore, where the basin was logged nearly clean to timber the Comstock—the forest that paid for the silver, and the century it has spent growing back
• Stewart Indian School — 10 mi
  The federal boarding school that took Great Basin children from 1890 to 1980 to erase their cultures—its student-built stone campus now a tribally-guided museum telling the story in alumni voices

More markers nearby

• Kingsbury Grade — 1.1 mi
• Carson Valley — 2.4 mi
• Boyd Toll Road — 2.9 mi
• Nevada’s Birthplace — 3.0 mi