Cottonwood Hot Springs Inn Colorado

Cottonwood Hot Springs Inn near Buena Vista, Colorado, is a historic natural hot spring resort in the Arkansas River valley at 8,000 feet elevation, where bicarbonate-rich geothermal pools set among cottonwood trees offer soaking with direct views of the Collegiate Peaks — a cluster of 14,000-foot summits named for Ivy League universities including Mount Harvard, Mount Yale, Mount Oxford, and Mount Princeton. The springs have been attracting bathers since Ute indigenous use, through Victorian-era development in the 1880s, to today's intimate resort of small pools at varying temperatures surrounded by the dramatic scale of Colorado's highest mountain concentration. Buena Vista is Arkansas River white-water rafting's capital city, with the Browns Canyon National Monument adjacent to town offering Class IV rafting through granite gorges beneath the Collegiate Peaks' snowy summits.