What is Verde Hot Springs?
In the early 1920s a rancher named Floyd Williams and his son built a hotel around a hot spring on the west bank of the Verde, a few bends upriver from the Childs hydroelectric plant, and for forty years people took the long road down for the waters. The Verde Hot Springs Hotel burned in 1962 and was never rebuilt. What is left is its concrete footprint, a main pool and a small cave pool that run about 104 degrees, several cooler rock pools along the river, and half a century of painted graffiti and painted-over graffiti on the walls. It has been a free, unregulated, clothing-optional soak for about as long, and it still is.
The setting is the point: a deep green canyon of the Verde, cold river a few feet from hot water, cliffs and cottonwoods, and nobody collecting anything. On a quiet winter morning it is one of the best places in Arizona; on a warm spring Saturday it is a party you did not RSVP to.
What you get is a hot spring with no fee, no gate, no hours and a real river between you and it. What you do not get is a parking lot at the pools, any facility beyond the Childs vault toilet, or any say over what your neighbors wear.
How to do it right
Check the river first. Watch the Verde’s flow at the Camp Verde gauge before you leave; at low, clear flow the ford is a knee-to-thigh wade on slippery rock, at high flow it is a swim with consequences, and after a storm the river runs brown and fast for days. Skip it during spring runoff or after monsoon storms. See the flash-flood entry; it applies to rivers too.
Get there. Take I-17 north about 85 miles to SR 260 at Camp Verde, then east about 7 miles to Forest Road 708 (Fossil Creek Road). Turn right and follow FR 708 roughly 15 miles of graded, then steep and rough, dirt to the junction with FR 502, then 6 miles south on FR 502 to the old Childs power plant and the camping area on the river. The Forest Service calls FR 502 very bad and recommends high clearance; four-wheel drive helps when it is muddy, and the clay is slick after rain. Ignore any map app that routes you via Dugas Road. Figure 3 hours from Old Town. From Childs, walk upstream on the old road and the cairned path for about a mile, then ford the river to the ruins on the far bank; round trip about 2.5 miles. Pack water shoes for the ford, a dry bag for your clothes, and a headlamp if you plan to soak at dusk.
Know the permit line. None for the springs or Childs. The first 15 miles of road run through the Fossil Creek permit corridor, where parking and stopping are restricted from April 1 to October 1 and rangers work the FR 708 junction; the Childs road is outside it, but confirm with the Red Rock Ranger District at (928) 203-2900 before a summer trip.
Pick the season. October through April. Go midweek in November or February and you may have the pools to yourself; spring break and warm weekends bring a party crowd to Childs, and the springs are better early in the morning before it wakes up. Summer is hot and the water is already hot.
Water. None to drink anywhere; bring it all.
Camp at Childs, by the river rules. A Verde Wild and Scenic River order limits fires within a quarter mile of the water to fire pans or stoves and requires overnight river users to carry out human waste. Childs, with its vault toilet, is exempt, so sleep there: free, 14-day limit, no water, no trash service.
Culture and dogs. Nudity is customary and has been for decades. Decide whether that suits your group before you drive out; if the crowd is not your crowd, there are rock pools downstream where the river is quieter. Dogs are fine under control; keep them out of the hot pools and leashed around people. Leave the ruins as you found them and pack out everything.
Skip it if you want a hot spring with a parking lot; there is none near Phoenix, and this is what we have. For river camping without the road, Clear Creek at Camp Verde has a campground and pavement, and Horseshoe Campground below the upper dam has cottonwoods and a shorter dirt drive. Midweek in winter, Verde Hot Springs is worth every rut.
The power plant that opened the canyon
The springs were known long before the hotel. The lower Verde canyon is Yavapai and Dilzhe’e Apache country, and the hot water on the west bank was used for its curative powers for generations; a New York Times description from 1960 still calls the springs “favored by Indians.” The Army’s removal of the Yavapai and Apache to the Rio Verde Reserve and then, in 1875, to San Carlos emptied the canyon of its people a generation before anyone built on it.
What brought a road to this bend of the river was electricity, not bathing. In 1900 a rancher named Lew Turner bought the water rights to Fossil Creek, the spring-fed stream that enters the Verde a few miles upstream, intending to make power for the mining camps. The Arizona Power Company, a forerunner of Arizona Public Service, built the Childs plant on the Verde’s east bank in 1908 and 1909, hauling its turbines and generators 40 miles over a trail from Mayer with crews that were mostly Apache and Mojave; Fossil Creek’s water came down a flume and dropped through the turbines, and the current went to the copper mines at Jerome. A second plant, Irving, followed on the creek itself in 1916. The road you curse today is the one the power company cut to reach its machines.
The hotel followed the road. Floyd Williams and his son Floyd Jr. opened the springs to the public in April 1922, according to the Weekly Journal Miner, and the Arizona Republic reported excavation for a hotel beginning in 1928. The Verde Hot Springs Hotel drew guests down the long dirt road for three decades to sit in mineral water the early visitors credited with easing arthritis, sinusitis and rheumatism. In 1962 it burned to the ground. Nobody rebuilt it, and the concrete pools and foundations on the far bank became what they have been ever since: a free, unregulated soak that the counterculture adopted in the decades after the fire and has never given back. The graffiti is their layer on the ruin.
The federal government’s main contribution has been to the river. In 1984 Congress designated the Verde above Horseshoe Reservoir as Arizona’s first Wild and Scenic River, and the rules that follow from that, fire pans only within a quarter mile of the water and pack out your waste, are why everyone sleeps at Childs, which is exempt, and walks to the springs. The power plants that started it all were listed on the National Register in 1991, shut down by Arizona Public Service in 2005 for the little electricity they made, and in 2008 APS removed the Fossil Creek dam, the flumes and the access roads and gave the creek its full flow back, which is why Fossil Creek now needs a permit and the Childs road still does not. The Childs plant’s shell and the camping area that took its name are what remain on the east bank.
Why it matters
Verde Hot Springs is the Verde’s whole modern history in a quarter mile: a sacred spring, a copper company’s power plant, a dirt-road resort that burned, a river Congress protected and a creek a utility gave back. It is also the last free, undeveloped hot spring within three hours of Phoenix, and it has stayed that way because the road, the ford and the customs keep most people out. For a Scottsdale visitor the verdict is this: go midweek in winter with a high-clearance vehicle, check the gauge, sleep at Childs, and decide before you leave whether a clothing-optional crowd is part of the trip or a reason not to take it.