Hiking to Sulphur Springs in Valles Caldera

Valles Caldera National Preserve is one of the most amazing places on earth and is worth a drive across the country to check out. It is a collapsed super-volcano that exploded around 1.2 million years ago and is featured in Wandering in the Clear Light of New Mexico, 60 Hikes within 60 Miles: Albuquerque, and in this recent brief article in the Albuquerque Journal. One look at it will take your breath away.

Because of the books and article, I have been to the Preserve many times and have explored much of its backcountry. But there was one remote corner on the western edge of the Preserve that I had not explored – Sulphur Springs. Up until 2020, Sulphur Springs was part of a small privately-owned 40-acre in-holding.

When I last stopped by the Caldera visitor center a few weeks ago, I noticed that the Park Service has recently established a trailhead, at the end of an old Forest Service road to provide easy access to Sulphur Springs. Since Sulphur Springs is in the Preserve’s backcountry and off-limits to dogs, I had to wait until I got back to the area without my dogs.

I finally got back last week to do a quick reconnaissance excursion and didn’t even think to bring my camera. Fortunately, I did have my phone to take some pictures because what I ran into was amazing.

Getting to the trailhead is quite easy. Just turn on Sulphur Creek Road (FS 105) at mile marker 27 on NM Highway 4. From there it’s a two-mile drive to a gate that marks the boundary between National Forest land and the Preserve. The first mile of the drive passes some houses and the last mile is a bit rougher but not impossible.

With Valles Caldera now being a fee area, you can use your phone to pay the entrance fee at the trailhead or make sure you have a park pass. (Fees are waived with an America the Beautiful pass.)

From the trailhead it’s an easy half-mile walk along the old road to Sulphur Springs. You’ll start smelling the springs before you get there. And before you know it, the forest will disappear and you’ll be stepping into a barren moonscape. The sulphuric acid in the water and the sulphurous fumes in the air has cleared all but the hardiest of vegetation. In fact, the stream has algae that has adapted to the hostile environment.

But as you look around, you’ll see traces of a former hot spring spa and earlier sulphur mining. The mining only lasted a few years and ended around 120 years ago. The hot spring spa made it until the main building burned down in the 1970s. The Park Service eventually hopes to clear out the remaining traces of development to have a more natural experience.

With this being a very dry year, there was not much water coming out of the springs nor was there steam coming out of the fumaroles. But where there was water, it was bubbling. Since all the water holes were surrounded by mud, I couldn’t get close enough to see if the water was hot. But the mud surrounding the water was very creamy and cool to the touch. And when I wiped the mud on my fingers off on my shorts, the mud took the color off my shorts. In fact my fingers had a bit of a tingling from touching the mud.

When I walked by some of the mud pots and fumaroles, I didn’t see any steam, but I could hear the ground growling down below – it was very eerie. Even though there wasn’t any steam, there were plenty of fumes wafting from the ground.

As mentioned earlier, the super-volcano that created the caldera exploded 1.2 million years ago. Since then, there has been considerable resurgent volcanic activity, and all of the hills and mountains within the caldera are a product of that resurgent volcanism. Even though the most recent volcanic activity occurred around 50,000 years ago, Valles Caldera is still an active volcano and Sulphur Springs is good place to see that there is still plenty of magma not too far below the surface (maybe four and half miles below).

And as for me, Sulphur Springs was way more than I was expecting, and I can’t wait to come back when it is cooler and wetter so I can see steam pouring out of the mud pots and fumaroles.