The rare Black Supermoon, just a tiny sliver in the sky of bazillions of tiny diamonds, was only an accessory – a promise of light rather than light itself. As the miles spun below us, we began wondering if we took the right road to Tecopa Hot Springs Resort, our destination for the night before driving north to Death Valley.
We passed a sign next to the road announcing a “Mission” but could see nothing but the sign itself surrounded by giant clumps of desert grasses. Another less tidy and hand-lettered sign announced the Desert Resort for Naturalism which we figured meant ‘nudist colony’. Makes sense. This patch of empty desert is the perfect place for the au natural set. Nobody would care if they saw a naked person; they’d just be glad to see another human being at all.
Finally we came to Tecopa, California, an intersection among a few older houses and slightly newer corrugated buildings – perhaps temporary at one time but now fixtures in this Desert road junction. We spied what appeared to be an active fire department and the remains of boarded up businesses. At least there were signs of settlement. Absolutely no one was about and no door had the welcome mat out.
Our nav system directed us to turn north and in just a few minutes our high beams illuminated a sign announcing “Tecopa Hot Springs Resort.” We were at our destination, a thermal area with bubbling hot springs in the middle of the inhospitable Mojave. I had emailed the proprietors and Amy had emailed back letting me know to just come on in and find a spot – we could settle up in the morning. We found the small building which serves as the Office with a hand-drawn map of the place showing the general layout of the RV and tent sites posted next to its door. But the hand-drawn map couldn’t convey that this rather casual grid went increasingly UP.
I’m really not the judgey kind so I guess ‘resort’ could describe the property before us. The collection of modest RVs and truck trailers surrounding a few ancient ‘cabins’ and slightly more modern buildings certainly had that casualness that defines resorts.
We happily spied a few heads through the windows of the transient structures laid out in a grid. Some of the resort guests clearly had made the Resort their home, decorating their ‘pads’ with Casper the Ghost and other unworldly statuettes. Giant flower pots lined the boundaries of the pads, providing some sense of tidiness but mostly acting as warnings of imminent danger of the drop-offs behind them.
We drove up and then up again, passing what we determined was the shower and hot tub block for the campground, all the way to the end of the graded, graveled road. The whole place was basically gravel and rock, bladed out of a rocky hill. I’m sure it crossed both our minds that most of our friends and certainly our families would have turned around by now. Instead, the general shabbiness of the place seemed perfect for our adventure into the Mojave Desert, a place of myth and mystery, a good start for our excursion into Death Valley in the morning.
Although seemingly impossible, the dark thickened, the tiny sliver of a moon having sauntered beyond the horizon. Having readied our tent shelters for the long, cold night, we dragged our weary bodies down to the clean and welcoming tubs where we soaked until our bodies felt warm in the chill night. Returning to our camp, we unfolded our camp chairs to eat supper and wait in the darkness, a small ‘campfire’ of electric votive candles for company. We wrapped ourselves in our warmest clothes and blankets and waited, trying to keep warm as the temperatures dropped even more. Deserts like cold, crisp nights.
We had left a badly penciled map on the door of the Office for our friends Deanna and John and hoped they would be able to find us on our lonely aerie above the other inhabitants of the Resort. Once the silence was punctuated by a lone vehicle lumbering down the vacant road but the sound continued down the empty road below. The blackness seemed impenetrable.
Finally, late in the night, we heard the sounds of a pickup hesitantly making its way up to our rocky perch. Although it was too dark to see even the outline of a truck, I jumped up and waved at the occupants of the vehicle, assuming it just HAD to be our friends. Deanna and John were equally happy to see us as we exchanged our delight that we had all actually found each other in the vastness of the Mojave. Melissa and I then quickly disappeared into our tents to sleep the sleep of cold and weary travelers.
I always awake with the dawn. I like to greet the morning and watch Brother Sun frugally lend his light to the day. I crawled out of my warm sleeping bag wondering what else I would see of this tiny settlement - a small gathering of RVs, mobile homes and older structures of every type seemingly thrown on the desert floor as if tossed like jacks. Clearly, no zoning laws impede the progress of development in this place.
Tecopa Hot Springs would make a great set for Twilight Zone. Old cars, RVs, broken down buildings – a place the ‘future’ has left behind. I’m guessing its few permanent residents like it this way. Perfect for the desert; a reminder that there are still wild places people can get lost on purpose in the American West. The tableau that seemed haphazardly laid out before me down the hill along the road was nothing I had really ever seen before except in my imagination when reading John Steinbeck or Hunter Thompson or in pictures of the days of the Dust Bowl. The hillbilly in my blood helped me fit right in.
I wandered down to the hot springs,
the main attraction of this scrubby salt pan of a valley. A ‘regular’, a
semi-retired gent who weekends at Tecopa, explained all the sites and must sees –
well THE must see – of Tecopa, a large mud pond just outside of town which purportedly has healing powers. He chatted about the more modern resort of
the four that offered hot springs in this tiny berg – it was called Delights.
Apparently an enterprising proprietor had somehow managed to strike up a
bustling trade with Korean tour companies which added a little worldliness to
the place. Globalization in the Mojave. He told us ‘our’ resort was the ‘coolest’,
attracting more artists and hippy types. I like being part of the cool crowd,
especially if cool means weird and unusual to the max.
He told us of the great anomaly of
the place. One of the owners, the guy, is a highly renowned chef who brings people
from all over the valley to his gourmet dinners every Friday, Saturday and
Sunday nights. Artists and prospectors and hippies and survivalists as well as
guests at the four hot springs resorts converge at the Tecopa Hot Springs Resort’s
extremely small and mostly closed restaurant in order to eat like kings and
queens in the middle of the Mojave. I like that. Gourmet food in the desert
without having to get dressed up. Heck, without having to even wash up.
Honestly, if your gold standard is no less than a Holiday Inn Express, you might just want to skip the drive down the long, lonely road to Tecopa. But if you crave something REALLY different and you are a big fan of hot springs, give it a try. Just make sure to stop by on the weekend when you can get a hot gourmet meal for $20 served by a chef who chooses to run an unlovely but funky ‘resort’ in the middle of the most inhospitable desert in America.
