Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Devil's Thumb Ranch,
3530 County Road 83, Tabernash, CO 80478, 800-933-4339,
www.devilsthumbranch.com.
Dunton Hot Springs.
In the 1890s, the town of Dunton had a population of 500, most of
whom worked the nearby mines. By 1918, the mine had shut down and Dunton, like many
Colorado towns, became a ghost town. Although it had a short reincarnation in the 1970s as
a hangout for hippies, bikers, and nude volleyball types who traded beers for dips in the hot
springs, its bordello, saloon, and cabins basically sat boarded up for 75 years.
Then in 1994, Christoph Henkel and Bernt Kuhlman, a German and Austrian who were
skiing in nearby Telluride, heard that the entire town was for sale at about the same price
as a condo in Aspen. Fifteen minutes after finding the place (it's a good 45 minutes from
the nearest non-ghost town), the European friends decided to snatch it up, battered facade be
damned.
After funneling three million dollars into the 187-acre place (each of the 12 cabins is
decorated by a Munich art dealer with a monstrous budget and extremely good taste), they
found that they'd fallen so madly in love with their “vild vest” ghost town that, rather than
sell lots, as they had originally intended, they'd rent them out. Before long, they opened their
ghost-town spa to individual guests such as Darryl Hannah, Tom Cruise, and Ralph Lauren.
The yoga room is a former Pony Express stop, the bathhouse still has bullet holes in it, the
library is an old barn furnished with distressed-leather armchairs and bearskin rugs, and the
dining hall is the town's old saloon with a long wooden bar scratched with names of people
who have tipped the bottle there. Butch Cassidy, who allegedly stayed in Dunton after rob-
bing his first bank in Telluride, provided one of the autographs.
Each of the 12 restored cabins, although imperfect on the outside, is tremendously lux-
urious on the inside, with African textiles, baronial antiques, broadband Internet, radiant floor
heating, and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of art. Rates for an overnight stay, in-
cluding all meals, start at $300 per person. A five-night spa package with all amenities is
$2,200, while a three-night equestrian adventure package is $1,300. Dunton Hot Springs is
reached via a 22-mile dirt road.
Dunton
Hot
Springs,
P.O.
Box
818,
Dolores,
CO
81323,
970-882-4800,
www.duntonhotsprings.com.
