Glenwood Springs - A Soak on the Way West

Thursday, September 03, 2009
Glenwood Springs, Colorado, United States
Our drive west began with a mix of that relaxed and happy feeling you get after very strenuous exercise from our Red Rocks boot camp combined with the grungy feeling of dried perspiration and dust caked onto your body. What better antidote for this grungy feeling and the lactic acid still in our muscles than a soak in the pool at Glenwood Hot Springs about three hours west of Denver?

Glenwood Springs is a very attractively situated town on the way west from Denver . About an hour west of the Vail Valley, it sits at the western entrance to steep and narrow Glenwood Canyon through which the Colorado River flows where it converges with the Roaring Fork River which flows downward from Aspen. At a lower elevation than the ski towns, Glenwood has a much warmer climate but is surrounded by attractive scenery and still close to the recreation.

The town's big tourist draw is Glenwood Hot Springs, a natural hot springs and hotel resort which claims to have the world’s biggest hot springs pool. I’ve passed by more than a dozen times on the highway over the years and find I’m often staying in Vail for skiing with people vowing to take the hour-long trip west for an evening soak, but up until this I’ve never done it. Glenwood’s facilities are very nice, something I can’t say for all of the hot springs I’ve been to, some of which are a touch grungy and seedy. But bigger doesn’t necessarily always mean better. There are some smaller hot pools, but the gigantic main hot springs pool at Glenwood I found to be a little cooler than I’d like, far warmer than a swimming pool, of course, but not the kind of restoratively warm water muscles aching after boot camp or a body chilled by a day of skiing yearns for. There are hotter smaller pools on the grounds for that, though.

Needless to say, after a soak and a swim we needed lunch with a beer. Almost every small mountain town in Colorado has its own Microbrewery, and luckily for us Glenwood Springs is no exception. An pint of Cattle Creek American IPA and a Black & Blue Bison Burger with Bacon at the Glenwood Canyon Brewpub was exactly what I needed for the next leg of the journey on what was turning out for me to a perfect Colorado day.
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