Water From the Rock: The Paiute Springs
Long before there was a bridge, a highway, or a single peach orchard in this valley, there was steam rising off the Virgin River just north of where La Verkin and Hurricane now shake hands. The Southern Paiute knew this place intimately. In the Numic tongue their word for water is pah (you'll also see it written pa), and the word for rock is timpe — so Pah Tempe comes down to us as roughly "water from the rock." That's about as honest a name as any spot ever earned. To the Paiute the springs were sacred healing ground, a place of renewal and balance where the sick came to mend and the medicine men worked. The same root hides right next door in Timpoweap, the old name for this very stretch of gorge.
The first Europeans to smell the place were the Franciscan padres Domínguez and Escalante, who came through in 1776 and were so struck by the rotten-egg tang of the water that they christened the whole river the Río Sulfureo — the Sulfur River. Utah's pioneers were blunter still: in the earliest settler records the seeps show up as "Poison Springs" (and the name gets spelled "Pa Tempe") before the prettier Paiute version finally won out. Same water, three very different first impressions.
The Sanitorium, the Swimmers, and the Sulfur Face Cream
The springs entered the settler era as a working amenity, not a getaway. Thomas Judd, the first recorded owner, dreamed of turning the bench above them into "the garden spot of Dixie." When the La Verkin Fruit and Nursery Company organized in 1889 and began punching the La Verkin Canal through the cliff — water was running through its tunnel by 1891 — the hot springs became the bathhouse and swimming hole for the crews. The men digging the far more famous Hurricane Canal (finished in 1904) soaked their aching backs in the same 108-degree water.
The resort proper was born on paper on December 30, 1914, when locals incorporated the La Verkin Sanitorium and Resort Company with Andrew B. Christenson as president. The grand opening came May 1, 1918, complete with a 15-by-45-foot swimming pool and a list of rules that tells you everything about the era: no naked bathing, modest suits required, and strict limits on diving. Through the 1920s and '30s the place drew church outings, college swim parties, and Boy Scout troops all the way down from Salt Lake City. Manager Winferd Gubler (1927–1934) strung up rope swings and set out diving boards, and stockholders flashed privilege cards for a free dip.
Around 1952 a new owner, Penn Smith, bought the resort and gave it the name history remembers — Pah Tempe Hot Mineral Springs. Smith was a believer in the water's minerals; in the 1960s he was bottling it into sulfur face packs, shampoos, and lotions. Later stewards, including Ken Anderson and Myke Appleby, who took over the lease in 1985, rebuilt the property into a health spa — seven stone grotto pools tucked against the river, run as a place for wellness and quiet, "not a place for wild blowouts," as Anderson put it. For a generation of southern Utahns and wandering seekers, that come-as-you-are Pah Tempe was the soak people still talk about.
Why the Gate Is Locked
Two forces closed Pah Tempe: salt and water rights. Those springs are no trickle. They pour out roughly 5,000 gallons a minute — better than seven million gallons a day — of 107-degree mineral water, and riding along with all that heat is an astonishing load of dissolved salt: about 110,000 tons of it every year. That makes this one canyon seep the second-largest single source of salt loading to the entire Colorado River. Under the interstate programs that fight Colorado River salinity, water that mineral-heavy stops being a novelty and becomes a management problem worth millions.
The trouble started for the springs in the early 1980s, when blasting for the Quail Creek project cracked the old pool and drained the grottos. The Washington County Water Conservancy District acquired the property and the majority of its water rights in 1994, became sole owner in 2013, and closed public access that same year. The reasons stacked up: the site sits in a flood plain below cliffs that shed rock, a 2011 flood chewed up the grounds, and the district had every incentive to control where all that salty water went. The beloved rustic Pah Tempe simply stopped being open — and it has stayed that way ever since.
Here's the part worth getting straight, because it trips up a lot of visitors. The old Pah Tempe you may have read about is gone, and has been closed for more than a decade — please don't drive down expecting to soak, and please don't hop a fence onto district land. The water, though, didn't disappear. In 2024 the company WorldSprings broke ground on a $60 million resort called Zion Canyon Hot Springs, which pipes the mineral water about half a mile, treats out the sulfur smell, tempers it to a comfortable 90–104 degrees, and opened to ticketed guests on July 14, 2025. So there is once again a hot-spring soak on this water — 53 pools, introductory admission around $39 — but understand it's a modern, paid, temperature-controlled resort, not the wild little grotto Pah Tempe of memory. The water district and Hurricane City have floated ideas about someday reopening public recreation at the historic springs themselves, but as of 2026 that remains talk with no timeline.
What the Hurricane Fault Is Doing Down There
The geology here is the real showstopper, and it's free to appreciate. The heat comes courtesy of the Hurricane Fault, a great crack in the earth that runs some 250 miles from central Utah down toward the Grand Canyon. The fault acts like an underground dam, and where it slices across this canyon it lets deep, mineral-charged groundwater rise straight to the surface along the fractures. The valley's volcanic past does the heating — those black basalt cliffs you see around La Verkin and Hurricane are lava flows a couple hundred thousand years old, and the same buried heat warms the water on its way up.
By the time it reaches daylight the water is 107 to 110 degrees and loaded with more than a dozen dissolved minerals — sulfate, chloride, sodium, calcium, and iron chief among them. Boosters have long claimed it carries the highest mineral concentration of any hot spring in the United States. Whether or not that title holds, the evidence is plain: the pale mineral crust caking the rocks, the faint blue-green cast to the pools, and that eggy sulfur smell drifting up the canyon that named a river three centuries ago.
What You Can and Can't Do Now
Let's be plain so nobody wastes a trip: you cannot visit the historic Pah Tempe grottos. The property is owned by the Washington County Water Conservancy District, the gate is closed, and there is no legal public access or soaking at the old springs — no exceptions, no scrambling down the riverbank. It's closed, it's posted, and the cliffs and flood plain that helped close it are genuinely dangerous.
What you can do: take in the canyon and the Virgin River from public vantage points nearby, appreciate the Hurricane Fault geology and the black-lava gorge, and dig into the history that makes this bend in the river special. And if it's a mineral soak you're after, the ticketed Zion Canyon Hot Springs resort in La Verkin now runs on this very water — just go in knowing it's a commercial resort experience, priced and scheduled accordingly, and not the free-spirited Pah Tempe of the old postcards.
Nearby — make it a loop
Since the springs themselves are off-limits, build your day around the open country that surrounds them — most of it within a few minutes' drive. Start in La Verkin at Confluence Park, the quiet river park where the Virgin River meets Ash Creek; it's the same river that runs past Pah Tempe, just a short way upstream, so you're standing in the same watery story. From there, cross the deep gorge on the "Octopussy" lava-canyon bridge — the tall La Verkin–Hurricane bridge that spans this exact canyon a little downstream of the springs, so named because a stunt from the James Bond film was shot off it. The whole area hangs off the SR-17/SR-9 gateway junction, the crossroads where the La Verkin highway hands you off toward Zion; it's your natural pivot point for the loop.
For a real taste of the pioneer grit behind this valley, walk a stretch of the Hurricane Canal Trail in Hurricane, which follows the hand-dug 1904 canal — the same back-breaking project whose workers once soaked at Pah Tempe — clinging improbably to the cliff face. And if you want a soak-worthy reward you can actually reach for free, point the truck up the rough road to Toquerville Falls, where the little town of Toquerville hides a set of cascades and wadeable pools in the desert. String those together and you'll have seen the best of the canyon country the old springs were the heart of.