Mystic Valley

Here’s how you find the Mystic Hot Springs. Get off Interstate 70, in south central Utah’s Sevier Valley. Pass through tiny Joseph, then over a hill, then you see Monroe, a little green jewel nestled quietly against the Monroe Mountains. Head through town, past the girls playing tennis, up another hill, till the road turns to gravel, and at the end of the line, behind a large white house with hippie buses parked out in front, flanked on one side by mining-era shacks and on the other by an empty pool, is owner Mike Ginsburg and his three dogs.

Ginsburg found Monroe 12 years ago, when his bus broke down on his way back to Denver from a Grateful Dead show in Las Vegas. He sold everything in Denver to buy the hot springs property. He figures this would be impossible in California or Colorado. “It would be overrun with people and it would cost a fortune.”

Ginsburg shows a bemused look when I tell him that people have been suggesting to us that Utah is not quite so conservative as you would think. “I think it’s very conservative,” he responds. “In Salt Lake the liberals, the gays, minorities seem to have a bigger voice than they do in other places.”

But Ginsburg likes the conservatism. It means Monroe is quiet. It’s safe. It’s not crowded. The shouts of kids in practicing football down the street fill the air. It’s a town where girls ride their bikes down the drowsy main drag, while a guy in fatigues pulls up in an ATV to the town’s lone gas station (a Texaco with two pumps) his girlfriend seated behind him, a bow and arrow perched in her lap. And, as he points out, he also gets to interact with visitors to the hot springs. He gets around ten folks a day, and they come from all over the world.

On this day there’s not much talk of the Democratic convention, or the November election; the big issue here is energy. A developer has proposed building a coal-fired power plant, which county officials seem to be pushing. Frankly, you might think a largely right-leaning citizenry might support it, too, especially in the resource rich Intermountain West, the history of which is closely bound up in the extraction of natural resources. But Ginsburg says that residents have banded together to fight it. Thermal inversions would trap carbon emissions, and put the equivalent of thousands of cars in the valley. Residents have managed to get the issue on the ballot this November.

Out back, Ginsburg leads us up some stone paver steps to the hot springs. The water pours off the hillside and across gleaming orange rock formations that look glazed pumpkins. At the base of the rocks are several weathered bathtubs.

Ginsburg plays in a jam band and has hosted more than 600 concerts back hosts. Ginsburg thought about selling it all once, but realized he wouldn’t know what he’d do, where he’d go, that was better than here. On this warm blue day with floating clouds, where the view of the valley goes on and on and on, it’s tough to disagree.