Leslie and David's Wanderings: 19 September 2020 Hot Springs National Park

We headed into Hot Springs to get some lunch and get a lay of the park. We found a Mexican food restaurant with really good review and stopped in to see how it was. The front of the building is a Mexican grocery store and the restaurant was in the back. La Bodeguita was some of the best Mexican food we have had since we left Texas. We will be going back! After Lunch we perused the store and picked up some items we never see in any of the usual grocery stores.

After lunch we headed into the central district. Hot Springs NP was formed in 1921. Prior to that, in 1823, it had been designated a national reservation to protect the hot springs and the surrounding rock formations. The park is like a donut with the city of Hot Springs filling the center and surrounding the outside. The Park encompasses the mountains to the north and south of the location where the majority of the hot springs are located. The area just below the hillside where the hot springs are located, is where the historic bathhouses are located. The area began seeing the building of bathhouses after the civil war. The bath spa era really took off in the late 1800s through the early 1930s. Wooden bathhouses were replaced with more elaborate buildings in the late 1910 through 1920s. The bath spa era fizzeled out by the late 1930s. In its hay day, over a million people a year visit Hot Springs for the rejuvenating hot baths every year. The roughly 100 hot springs were enclosed and the water routed to a central cistern in the early 1900s to preserve the quality of the water. All the bathhouses get the same water from the central cistern. Only one of the bathhouses is still open for bathing. Several were torn down over the years. The remaining bathhouses are now part of the National Park and have been turned into restaurants, museums, park store, and park visitor center. Due to COVID, most of the buildings were closed to the public.

The water that comes out of the hot springs falls as rain in Mountains to the North East of Hot Springs where it percolates down through the rock layers to 6000-8000 feet below the surface. The water gets gradually hotter as it descends (The temperature of the earth goes up 4 Degrees Fahrenheit for every 300 feet of depth). Between 6000 and 8000 feet it begins running horizontally along a fault until it is below Hot Springs where it percolates back up to the surface. It takes 4000-4400 years for the water to percolate down to the fault line! But only 100 years to work its way back up to the surface. The water exits the ground in Hot Springs at an average temperature of 143 degrees Fahrenheit! There are almost no minerals in the water, it has an almost perfectly neutral PH and the high temperature kills off any bacteria (They have fountains where you can get the spring water to fill your water bottles). So drinking the 4000 year old water as well as soaking in it was part of the draw to the area. There are a couple of springs that are still free flowing. You can see the steam coming off the pools even on a hot day (we tested the water with our hands and it is definitely warmer than you would want to climb into).

We were a bit surprised by the crowds in the central district. It was very busy. After finding parking for the Behemoth, we walked down to bathhouse row and found the park store. After getting our passport stamp, and shopping for our usual items, we made our way down Bathhouse Row, stopping to read the history behind each building, to the park visitor center. The building was closed, but they had an information desk outside, so we talked with the ranger there and got some hiking suggestions. We walked the rest of the way down the Bathhouse Row (there are 8 buildings still standing) to the green space at the north end. We climbed up the hill to the Grand Promenade, which runs along the hillside above the bathhouses, and walked it to the south end of the bathhouses. We then went back to the Behemoth and drove up to the top of the North Hill above bathhouse row and took in the views over the Ozark Mountains. Beautiful!