Location Taken: Thermopolis, Wyoming
Time Taken: June 2010
I’m zoning out as I write this, so I have no idea if this post will even make sense.
It’s the hot springs’ fault.
At the second, I’m in Thermopolis, Wyoming, home of a really fantastic therapeutic hot spring. Heck, it’s in the name, “thermo” means heat and “polis” means city. And this city of heat is a marvelous one. There’s a state park related to the natural springs, and a bunch of spas and pools related to it.
We visited the town on our cross-country trip two years ago, and loved it enough to include it in our current trip. The water is touted as “healing” and well, if what needs healing is congested sinuses or sore muscles, it certainly lives up to it.
And my muscles are certainly sore. Or at least they were before I spent an hour in the small hot tub fed directly from the natural hot spring. There’s two hotels that have been here so long they have a special permit to tap that water, if only because the pipes were laid long before such things as “environmentalism” and “preservation of natural features” even existed. It’s nicely warm (at least in the carefully regulated swimming pools) and smells slightly of minerals.
There’s not even that much sulfur in the scent, so it’s more unusual than unpleasant.
And I certainly smelled enough sulfur today, since we visited Yellowstone and checked out a bunch of the hydrothermal features there, many of which put so much sulfur in the air that it was a bit tough to breathe. Not that the high altitude and low oxygen helped much for that…
