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Dunton Hot Springs
Dunton, Colorado, United States · Independent · Grand Luxury
Butch Cassidy scratched his name into the saloon bar's old wood before robbing his first bank in nearby Telluride in 1889, and the graffiti survives at Dunton, a Colorado mining ghost town whose peak population of about five hundred soaked in a hot spring the miners dynamited larger. Christoph Henkel and Katrin Bellinger restored it log by log in the mid-1990s, and MICHELIN gave it Two Keys in 2025.
- 13 rooms
- Opened 2001
- Neighborhood: Dolores
About Dunton Hot Springs
- Butch Cassidy scratched his name into the saloon bar's old wood before robbing his first bank in nearby Telluride in 1889, and the graffiti was preserved when German industrialist Christoph Henkel restored the ghost town.
- At its mining peak around five hundred residents soaked in a hot-spring pool the miners dynamited into larger form, paying a nickel for the privilege along the West Fork of the Dolores River.
- By the 1970s and 1980s the abandoned settlement hosted hippie communes and naked volleyball tournaments before Henkel and art dealer Katrin Bellinger acquired the ruins in the mid-1990s.
- Logs from collapsing cabins were numbered, disassembled, and rebuilt during the restoration, treating the authenticity of the 1800s mining town as non-negotiable.
- MICHELIN recognized Dunton Hot Springs with Two Keys in 2025, the only Colorado property to receive the honor, for a twelve-cabin all-inclusive retreat in restored log structures.
History
Before any miner arrived, the Ute people hunted through this alpine valley in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado and likely soaked in the hot springs that rose from the fault-controlled geology of the West Fork of the Dolores River. The springs — controlled by tectonic forces associated with the Triassic Dolores Formation, surfacing along a north-trending fault — were a known feature of the landscape long before Europeans arrived. In the 1880s, Joe Roscio, a homesteader from Minnesota, established a 260-acre claim on this land and began mining for gold and silver. He never struck it rich in the veins, but the hot springs at the center of the settlement proved their own kind of mineral wealth: at its peak the mining community held around five hundred residents, and those residents soaked in the pool the miners dynamited into larger form and directed into a bathhouse, paying a nickel for the privilege. The isolation that made ore transport difficult also prevented Dunton from following the railroad, and by 1919, when rail access had organized the regional economy elsewhere, the log cabins along the Dolores River were largely abandoned.
The Roscio family's three sons — Joe, Chuck, and Emilio — returned, renamed the settlement Rancho Dolores, and ran it for fifty years as a family-operated resort: five-dollar-a-night cabins, a bar, the hot springs. Butch Cassidy, the outlaw who robbed his first bank in nearby Telluride in 1889, had made himself at home in the Dunton saloon before the robbery, and his name is scratched into the bar's old wood. The Roscio family sold Dunton in 1974 to investors, and by the 1970s and 1980s the settlement had become a free-for-all: hippie communes, naked volleyball tournaments, bikers who shot up the bathhouse and burned buildings for entertainment. Christoph Henkel, the German industrialist heir, and his wife, art dealer Katrin Bellinger, acquired the ruins of Dunton in the mid-1990s and spent years restoring it meticulously and reimagining it as an all-inclusive luxury resort. Logs from collapsing cabins were numbered, disassembled, and rebuilt; the saloon was preserved as found, graffiti and all; the cabins were renamed after the miners who built them.
Buildings were repositioned for a more convenient resort layout, but the authenticity of the old town was treated as non-negotiable. The result is a twelve-cabin retreat where guests sleep in restored 1800s log structures, dine in a nineteenth-century saloon, and soak in natural hot-spring pools under the San Juan sky. MICHELIN recognized Dunton Hot Springs with Two Keys in 2025 — the only Colorado property to receive the honor — citing a singular all-inclusive experience that no other property in the state, or perhaps the country, can replicate.
The setting
95 miles from Durango-La Plata County Airport.
Amenities
- Spa
- Pool
- Fitness center
- Onsen
- Pet-friendly
Awards
- MICHELIN Two Keys (2026)
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