Riggins Hot Springs

Private commercial property: Riggins Hot Springs is a historic lodge property on private land, in an ownership and operating transition as of late 2026. This page records what published sources document about the springs and the property, with current access stated as of the sources read in November 2026.

Riggins Hot Springs is the Salmon River canyon’s old resort address: a private 155-acre geothermal property at 1590 Big Salmon Road, about 9 miles east of Riggins in Idaho County, on the south side of the Salmon River at about 1,840 feet. The federal thermal springs list carries the source at 106 °F, and the U.S. Geological Survey’s GEOTHERM file carries it at 42 °C; the state’s 1973 geothermal bulletin describes not a single vent but a small vent field, four spring vents and numerous seeps rising through thin river alluvium along a north-trending fault.

A one-lane suspension bridge carries the property’s drive across the Salmon, and behind it stand a three-story lodge, condos and cabins, a geothermal pool and hot tub, a spring-fed pond, and over a mile of river frontage. Few Idaho springs have been written about for as long, or changed hands in as many forms, as this one.

Read the access plainly, because it has changed more than once and has changed again. For three decades this was The Lodge at Riggins Hot Springs, a small public resort. The lodge era ended, the property went up for sale in 2020, and since November 2024 it has been operated as The Community at Riggins Hot Springs, an events and community retreat whose published model, as of 2025, is hosted events and programming rather than general overnight stays, with the property in active refurbishment and its ownership in transition.

There is no walk-in soaking here. Anyone considering a visit should confirm current arrangements on the operator’s own site before making the drive, and this page will be updated as the property’s next chapter publishes itself.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

The drive is the easy part. From Riggins, the Big Salmon River Road runs east up the Salmon River canyon about 9 miles to the property’s bridge, a one-lane suspension bridge of about 350 feet that is the only way onto the grounds. The lodge, pools, and flat all sit on the far, south side of the river, on the bench the early record calls Warm Springs Flat.

Riggins itself is the river town at the junction of the Salmon and the Little Salmon, about three and a half hours north of Boise on U.S. 95, and the springs share the canyon’s banana-belt climate: low elevation, little snow, and year-round road access in ordinary winters.

The gate is not the road, it is the property line. This has been private land throughout its written history: a homestead purchase in 1900, a communal bathing place by road access from 1935 into the early 1970s, a private residence, a public lodge from 1991, and now a private community retreat.

As of November 2026 the honest summary is that the springs are not open to the passing public in any documented form, and the operator’s own published pages are the only reliable source for what, if anything, a visitor can book. Check there first, and do not rely on lodge-era guides, which describe a resort that no longer operates in that form.

The Soak

The developed soak is a pool complex, not a riverbank tub: a geothermal swimming pool and a smaller, hotter tub beside a pool house, fed by the vent field under the flat. The best contemporary description comes from the lodge era, when a magazine writer crossed the bridge for dinner and an evening soak and found the large pool at 94 °F under the stars and the smaller pool at 105 °F, with a sauna and massage on offer and dinner included in the room rate.

That resort, with its 10 guest rooms and Old West furnishing, is the version of Riggins Hot Springs most living visitors remember, and it is gone: the buildings stand, the new operator is refurbishing them for its community and events model, and no published source verifies the pools’ current temperatures, hours, or availability. The source water itself has not changed its paperwork in a century: 106 °F in the federal list, four vents and seeps along the fault in the state bulletin, and a river flat that has drawn people to warm water since long before any of it was written down.

History

The written history starts with the people who named the water. The Nez Perce called this spring “Weh-min-kesh,” Healing Waters in the gloss every source repeats, and used it extensively, a use the guides extend to medicinal mud baths and, in the 1860s, to the miners, hunters, and trappers who stopped at what they called the Fountain of Youth. In 1900 Fred and Clara Riggins bought the site from two squatters for six $20 gold pieces and settled on Warm Springs Flat; Fred ran a ferry at the mouth of Allison Creek and built the first bridge across the Salmon here in 1919.

CCC crews built the road to the springs in 1935, opening the communal bathing era that older Riggins residents grew up with, and the Forest Service rebuilt the bridge in 1943-44 and again after damage, in 1957. The 1989 federal river guide closes its entry with the flat statement that the spring was privately owned and closed to the public.

The modern chapter opens in 1991, when The Lodge at Riggins Hot Springs began receiving the public: an intimate, meals-included resort across its one-lane bridge, 10 rooms, two pools, and a reputation well beyond Idaho County. The lodge era ran about three decades. The property was listed for sale in June 2020, the lodge closed about 2022, and the listing worked its way down from the six-million range toward $3,925,000 while the lodge sign and a FOR SALE sign shared the entrance.

In November 2024 The Community at Riggins Hot Springs, a Mountain Sky Communities project led by Dr. Wayne Dorband, took occupancy under a lease with a purchase right and began remaking the property as an ecological living and events community, generating its first income in January 2025 by its own account. Whether that story ends in a purchase, and what public access, if any, the finished community offers, is not yet in the published record. This page will follow the sources as they settle.

Nearby Hot Springs

The nearest comparable listing is Burgdorf Hot Springs, the other historic commercial soak of this country, about 30 straight-line miles southeast in the mountains above the Secesh. Downriver at New Meadows, Zims Hot Springs runs the region’s straightforward public pools. More West-Central Idaho hot springs →