Jake Moe and Mariel Hemingway have proposed building a new Hemingway Hot Springs complex in the Warm Springs area near Bald Mountain. The project, which would encompass 12 hot-spring pools, two cold-plunge pools and two teepee massage rooms, is in the area where the famed Guyer Hot Springs used to attract guests from near and afar.

Learn about the old hot springs resort in this essay penned by Ketchum historian John W. Lundin.

BY JOHN W. LUNDIN

Guyer Hot Springs, two miles by stage from Ketchum, touted waters that were good for all nervous complaints, rheumatism, skin and blood affections: “This place is much resorted to by tourists and invalids. It is a beautiful, quiet mountain retreat,” purported the Wood River Times in 1899.

An aerial view of Guyer Hot Springs included the hotel and the pool. COURTESY: John W. Lundin

Guyer Hot Springs Resort was developed by Captain Henry Guyer Jr. and Isaac Lewis on a mining claim they made in 1880 on Warm Springs Creek. When the Resort opened on July 4,1882, it a had two-story hotel with ten rooms, a bar and restaurant, a bath house, a separate women’s parlor and plung, and a 20-by-40-foot dance floor.

The bar receipts on opening day were $253, a considerable sum in those days and worth $8,680 in today’s dollars.

It was Ketchum’s center for recreation and entertainment, as well as a tourist destination, until the late 1920s.Carrie Adell Strahorn, who saw Guyer Hot Springs in the early 1880s, said it was located in an ideal spot where a grove of magnificent old gnarled trees made a grand natural park for pleasure parties.

The “History of Idaho Territory,” published in 1884, said Guyer Hot Springs was the grandest hot-springs watering-place in the United States: “These springs, two miles west of Ketchum, are one of the curiosities, as well as health resorts, of the territory. They are among the great healing springs of the world. Many miners and prospectors taken there, when all medical aid had failed to relieve them, were fully restored to health in a few days.

Waters from the resort, which featured an attractive hotel, heated a couple dozen homes in modern times. COURTESY: John W. Lundin

“Large and commodious buildings have been erected containing parlors and rooms for guests and visitors, suitably furnished. A good hotel connected where board and lodging is furnished at reasonable prices, a number of bath rooms, also a large plunge and swimming bath for both ladies and gentlemen provided, for all who may call to enjoy the exhilarating and medical effects of this celebrated waters...”

Guyer Hot Springs Resort was improved and expanded over the decades. For its opening in May 1888, the managers had gone to heavy expense, making improvements at a cost of over $1,500. The main dining table on the lawn had a seating capacity for 250 persons. The area was surrounded with a beautiful arbor of green pines and covered with canvas. There was an ice cream and strawberry booth with a soda fountain and confectionary attachment. There also were two bands in attendance—the hotel’s Delius and the Ketchum Brass Band—primed to play at a dancing pavilion that could  accommodate 200 people.

In 1889, Union Pacific published a booklet promoting hot springs resorts served by the railroad throughout the West titled “A Description of the Western Resorts for Health and Pleasure Reached by the Union Pacific Railroad.” Guyer Hot Springs was two miles by stage from Ketchum, and “there is no more attractive place in the Northwest to spend a hot summer.”

The Springs were noted for their medicinal waters and “have a flattering reputation throughout southern Idaho and Utah.”

The hotel sat at 5,801 feet in elevation up against the mountainside. John W. Lundin

This romantic little mountain resort is situated about two miles from the town of Ketchum, Idaho, on the Wood River Branch of the Oregon Short Line 70 miles from Shoshone, it noted. Regular hacks run to and from from the springs in connection with branch trains.

“The springs are comparatively unknown outside of Idaho but are destined to become famous for the well-known medicinal qualities of the water and the great natural beauty of the place. The springs, about 15 in number, gush out from the mountain side, intensely hot, and are conveyed a short distance by pipe to the bathhouse where there are two large plunge baths and quite a number of single rooms with tubs. The waters are good for all nervous complaints, rheumatism, skin and blood affections. This place is much resorted to by tourists and invalids. It is a beautiful, quiet mountain retreat. The accommodations for guests are first class and, in addition to the hotel, there are bathhouses, bowling alleys, croquet and tennis grounds, swings, bandstands, and dancing platforms—everything in short, to make a visit pleasant.”

Union Pacific sold excursion tickets to Guyer Hot Springs from the following locations: Pocatello, $9.40; American Falls, $8.15; Minidoka, $6.50; Kimama,$5.75; Shoshone, $5.75; Glenn’s Ferry, $6.65; Mountain Home, $8.10; Kuna, $10.40; Boise City,$14.40; Caldwell, $11.30; Ontario, $12.85; Payette, $13.05.

In summer 1889, the round trip from Shoshone to the Resort cost $3; from Bellevue, 90 cents, and Hailey, 65 cents. The train left Shoshone at 8 a.m., arriving in Ketchum at 11:00 a.m. The train left Ketchum at 9 p.m., arriving at Shoshone at 11:30 p.m. Bands provided entertainment on the train.

There were plenty of rocking chairs to go around, as well as wooden wheelchairs and wicker chairs. COURTESY: John W. Lundin

Bathing facilities were separated by sex. The bathhouse was divided by a high partition with men bathing in their birthday suits on one side and women fully clothed in long dresses, pantaloons and stockings on the other.

Each May the entire community participated in the festive openings at the Resort, enjoying a picnic. free swimming and dancing. July and August were the resort’s busiest months, and guests would travel in a carriage between the Resort and the Oregon Short Line depot in Ketchum.

Ladies wore plumed hats and sixteen-button gloves while they played tennis or croquet, swung on a big wooden swing and danced in the pavilions. Women splashed in long pantaloons and dresses.

Guyer Hot Springs Resort attracted the rich and famous to the Valley to partake in its waters, along with regular tourists. In 1889, the proprietor of Guyer Hot Springs said he had $7 million in capital at his table. In 1891 and 1892, Union Pacific financier John Jay Gould brought a large party to the Wood River Valley, traveling in his private railroad cars to examine his mining interests. They visited Guyer Hot Springs.

In 1907, Captain Guyer died and the Oregon Short Line Railroad considered buying Guyer Hot Springs Resort from Mrs. Guyer, and expanding its operations. The Wood River Times noted, “Railroad People May Make a First-Class Resort There.” The railroad is expected to extend its line from Ketchum to the springs and build a large hotel, several cottages, gymnasium, bowling alley, large plunges, and other necessaries of a first-class summer resort.

A later paper postulated that the time would come when the Wood River Valley would be one of the most famous of all summer resorts: “It only needs to be taken hold of by persons with sufficient capital to improve some of the points of natural beauty, these working in conjunction with the railroad company. The Guyer Springs could be made the most attractive on the continent. They are at an altitude of some 6000 feet and are so beautifully located that the place is a source of endless delight…”

But the sale never went through and the resort remained in the hands of the Guyer family. In 1913, Captain Guyer’s son Raymond returned to the Wood River Valley from Peru to manage Guyer Hot Springs Resort. Raymond was a mining engineer who, like his father, worked in South America.

Raymond Guyer decided to build a large new hotel at the hot springs and greatly expand the facility. He hired architect F. H. Paradise, Jr. to design the hotel, and Charles Grout to oversee the building of the hotel and to be its new manager. Grout had managed the famous Idanha Hotel in Boise, which was designed by W. S. Campbell who also designed the McFall Hotel in Shoshone.

The Shoshone Journal of March 20, 1914, announced that “the beautiful new hotel” built by Raymond Guyer would open on May 1. The new hotel was built on a bench above the creek; the old hotel had been located on the creek. It cost $25,000, was a gracious two-story structure with gables, had 18 rooms upstairs, a beautiful lobby with a fireplace, and French doors leading to a dining room. It also featured small cottages on the grounds.

Charles Grout, the manager, was given carte blanche to order furnishings for the hotel, which was  heated with the natural hot water and had its own electric lighting system by means of a turbine engine. Grout also touted a kitchen garden, the dairy and chicken yard, which ensured fresh food, to say nothing of game in season.

Guyer, who also acquired famous saddle horses for guests’ use, invested $25,000--$780,000 in today’s dollars--into his Resort in 1914, at a time when Ketchum and the Wood River Valley were suffering economically. Guyer’s contractor said Ketchum then was “just a whistling post, with about 30 to 40 families living there.”

Charles Grout actively promoted the new hotel, and he turned the new Resort into Ketchum’s social hub. In 1914, he staged lavish parties for the upper-crust. Among the extravaganzas was a dress ball considered to be a veritable ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ as guests in the garb of pirates, literary figures, statesmen and characters from Mother Goose danced until 4:30 a.m.

In the mid-teens, the manager of the Guyer Hot Springs Resort joined with owners of the McFall Hotel in Shoshone and Hiawatha Hotel in Hailey in a somewhat misleading effort to market the Wood River Valley nationally, advertising tours to the “Stanley National Park,” even though such a facility did not exist.  They designed package tours using all three hotels.

After stays at the McFall hotel and the Hiawatha guests travel to Guyer Hot Springs to enjoy its amenities. Thereafter, they would be treated to motor tours north over Galena Summit into the Stanley Basin to enjoy the beautyof the Sawtooth Mountains.

In 1929 Carl and Dorothy Brandt, who opened J.C. Penny Stores in Shoshone and Hailey, moved to Ketchum and bought Guyer Hot Springs Resort. Guyer Hot Springs Resort had fallen into disrepair by the late 1920s. Brandt was concerned that the hotel’s distance from Ketchum, out a three-mile seasonal road, would discourage visitors, so he came up with a plan to establish a new hot springs resort on Ketchum’s Main Street.

That opened up a new era in hot springs in Ketchum—one remembered to this day by many Wood River Valley residents. Find out what happens in the final installment in Eye on Sun Valley next week.

                Editor’s Note: John W. Lundin is author of several historical books, including “Skiing Sun Valley: A history from Union Pacific to the Holdings.” He will offer a presentation on Sun Valley’s original public relations figure Steve Hannigan on March 25 at The Community Library.