Karen and Jeff's World

We spent our second day (August 22) at Valley View soaking in the various hot springs and swimming in the pool. Valley View has 5 natural hot springs and a large pool and hot tub heated by hot springs. The pool is the coolest at around 88 degrees (F) and the hot tub is the warmest at around 104 degrees (F).

While soaking in the spring closest to our camp site we watched a deer eating flowers for about 15 minutes within 15 feet of us. Unfortunately, we didn’t get pictures of that. Our cameras aren’t waterproof. Jeff did get some early morning pictures of a doe and her fawn as they passed by our tent.

We went to Valley View Hot Springs on August 21st. Valley View is located in the San Luis Valley just south of Villa Grove and north of the Great Sand Dunes. This was our second trip to the springs. The first trip while nice was plagued by about 10,000 mosquitos per cubic foot of space. At least it seemed that way. We went to Valley View after mosquitos hatched and before the bats returned. This is not a good time to go.

This trip was much more enjoyable. Very, very few mosquitos and we hiked up to the bat cave to see the bats come out for the night. The bat colony is one of the largest in the country for the bat species. There are 250,000 bats! It was quite a sight to see all the bats coming out of the cave. It takes 15-20 minutes for all the bats to leave the cave. The bat cave is a mine that collapsed in the early 1900′s.