Chico Hot Springs

The springs at the foot of Emigrant Peak were known to Native people long before the gold rush, and the miners working Emigrant Gulch in the 1860s used them mainly to bathe and to wash their clothes. In 1876 a settler piped the hot water, about 112 degrees at the source, under a greenhouse and grew vegetables for the neighborhood. Bill and Percie Knowles came into the property in 1894 and ran a boardinghouse for miners, and in 1900 they opened the Chico Warm Springs Hotel, with a big plunge pool and drivers to bring guests from the railroad stop at Emigrant, Northern Pacific passengers bound for Yellowstone among them.

Bill died in 1910, and Percie turned the place toward medicine. In 1912 she brought in Dr. George A. Townsend, who believed in the waters and practiced real surgery besides; a twenty-room hospital wing went up, and in 1920 it admitted 2,390 patients. Townsend left in the mid-1920s, the hospital wing came down in the lean years that followed, and after the family sold in 1948 Chico ran through gambling, dude-ranching and long quiet spells.

In 1976 Mike and Eve Art bought it and began bringing back the old hotel and its dining room, and the two outdoor pools have been the Paradise Valley's evening ritual ever since. The water runs into them from the springs without chlorine, and the kitchen grows some of its own produce, watered from the springs as the settler's garden was in 1876. Chico is on the east side of the valley off US-89, at Pray.