Sixteen years ago, Duane Graham left Portland and moved to a remote part of Oregon’s high desert to start building his dream: a cabin and RV resort called Summer Lake Hot Springs.
“I felt like, if you build it, they will come,” Graham said. “And it worked.”
Summer Lake Hot Springs is about 130 miles south of Bend and six miles north of Paisley, in a part of the state known as the Oregon Outback.
Graham was a Portland-area contractor when he bought the 145-acre property that included the hot springs in 1997. It was a former chicken farm along the southeast corner of Summer Lake. The property had a campground and a 1928-built bathhouse that needed a lot of work.
Graham had a vision of how to transform the rundown ranch into a healing resort. Since 2007, he’s constructed 10 cabins and rental houses on the property, along with three outdoor, rock-lined soaking pools next to the bathhouse.
Overnight accommodations are cute but rustic. Graham has sourced most of the fixtures from resale shops, giving each cabin a distinctive handcrafted feel with a desert-chic aesthetic. Think warm colors and exposed plaster walls. There’s no air conditioning, but the rentals do have geothermal heat that radiates up from concrete floors.
Cabins must be booked for a minimum of two nights, and day use is no longer allowed. That’s helped change the dynamic at the hot springs from when Graham first purchased the property.
“It was a lot more rowdy place back then,” he said. “It’s a lot more peaceful now. People come out here for quietness. People come out to heal.”
The bathhouse at Summer Lake Hot Springs outside of Paisley, Oregon is located inside an old 1920s-era barn.Samantha Swindler
The water that fills the outdoor tubs and bathhouse comes untreated from the ground at a temperature of 114-118 degrees.
“That’s really the main attraction, the hot water and the mineral properties of it,” Graham said. “It’s got a lot of silica in it, so it feels really smooth.”
The bathhouse and tubs are open 24 hours. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to soak under the stars and have the place all to yourself.
The hot springs are within the Basin and Range Dark Sky Cooperative, an area with minimal lighting to interfere with views of the night sky.
“To me, soaking out under the stars is the golden time,” Graham said. “There are so many people who come out here that have never in their life seen the Milky Way like you see it out here.”
- Night sky over Summer Lake Hot Springs, outside of Paisley, Oregon, a few days before the height of the Perseid meteor shower. Samantha SwindlerSamantha Swindler
Guests must bring their own towels and bedding, and they’d be wise to bring their own snacks and ice as well. (Paisley has one sit-down bar and restaurant; the town general store has coffee and sandwiches in the morning, but the food selection is limited.) Cabins have pour-over coffee makers but (as this writer sadly discovered) it’s up to you to bring your own coffee.
And it’s beautifully dark, which means, if you want to walk from the cabins to the bathhouse at night, bring a flashlight.
Summer months can be hot, and the bugs are relentless – they aren’t joking about Paisley’s famous mosquitos. Graham says the best times to soak are in the fall or winter months.
“Once you get out here, it’s sunny 90% of the time, and you can get out of the gloominess in the Willamette Valley,” he said. “As soon as you get across the pass, … the sky just opens up. It’s a whole different climate out here.”
This part of Oregon, about 100 miles from the Nevada border, is within the northwest corner of the Great Basin, an area that stretches down to the Mojave Desert where none of the river systems drain to the ocean. Summer Lake itself is sprawling and shallow, and really more of a marsh and migratory bird habitat.
Just a few miles away from the hot springs are the Paisley Caves, believed to hold evidence of the oldest known site of human occupation in North America. Visitors can also stop by Picture Rock Pass, the site of several petroglyphs, about 29 miles north of the hot springs.
Summer Lake Hot Springs doesn’t have wifi, and there are no TVs in the cabins. For travelers looking to unplug, Summer Lake Hot Springs offers a calming desert escape.
“A lot of people come from the city, and the city can be kind of hectic now, just with traffic and work and family and all the trappings of society,” Graham said. “People, they want to get away. And to provide healing for people is a good thing.”
If you go: Summer Lake Hot Springs is open year-round at 41777 Highway 31, about six miles north of Paisley. Accommodations include cabins, RV parking spots and space for dry camping. For reservations, visit summerlakehotsprings.com.
-- Samantha Swindler, sswindler@oregonian.com, @editorswindler