Coso Hot Springs: Sacred Waters Behind the Fence

Off to your east, behind a fence you'll never cross, the ground breathes. Water surfaces at 207 degrees Fahrenheit, near boiling, in a place the Timbisha Shoshone call Kooso. One of their local groups, the Koosotsi, took their very name from these springs: "the people from Coso Hot Springs." For them and for the Northern Paiute neighbors, this was not a curiosity but a place of power, where the sick came to heal in steam and mineral mud, and where ceremony continued long after settlers arrived.

The first written notice came in 1860, when a Silver Peak miner named M.H. Farley logged "boiling hot springs to the south." By 1909 the land, deeded to William T. Grant in 1895, had become a health resort. As automobiles spread, Angelenos and San Franciscans drove out to soak. The complex grew to a dozen guest cabins, a hotel, and a restaurant; bottled water and mud were sold as "Volcanic Health and Beauty from Nature's Great Laboratory," promising to cure everything from constipation to venereal disease. A 1930s billboard on this highway pointed east: ten miles to the cure.

Then the war machine arrived. In 1943 the Navy began buying up land for what became Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake; the springs themselves were taken by condemnation in 1947, and the resort closed for good. Today Coso sits inside the largest single landholding the Navy owns, beside the Coso geothermal field, which taps the same volcanic heat to power a quarter-million homes.

The land was never given back. Under agreements with California's Historic Preservation Office, the springs are protected as a sacred district, and tribal members are escorted in for periodic ceremonies. Tribes and the National Congress of American Indians have pressed for the land's return. For now, the steam still rises, witnessed mostly by guards and instruments.