Cottonwood Hot Springs - Colorado

I'm sure he's having a great time..the water's boiling, that's all.

Jon and I went by Cottonwood Hot Springs in Colorado a few months ago and it was such a neat place. I'd never been to anything like that before and it was immensely relaxing and enjoyable. We arrived at about 6 or 7pm, left a while later for dinner, and came back at night to watch the sky and hopefully see some stars. The place was open until midnight which I thought was awesome. We didn't stay late enough at the springs to see a sky full of stars but we did eventually get to see a night sky FILLED with stars at 3am while camping on a mountainside. I'd heard about these so-called night skies filled with glittering stars touching end-to-end but had never witnessed it until then. I'm from the city so I'd never seen such a phenomenon of stars; it was incredible. I wish I'd had all my friends and family around to experience it together. So great.

Yowzers. That really was some of the hottest water I'd ever been in. Maybe it wasn't really water. Maybe it was really fire. Add a couple of carrots and potatoes. I mean, it was cookin'!

Just a long shot so you can see the basic layout of the place. I believe they had a total of 5 pools with temperatures varying from fire-hot to cold (which is why no one's in the front-most pool pictured here. Everyone's in the back getting some heat therapy...)

This is a shot I took from the pool. It's not the most gorgeous shot taken while in Colorado but it is the one taken while at the hot springs and I wanted to use it instead of some other really pretty shots taken elsewhere.

So I was laying on my back against some flat rocks in the medium-hot pool looking up at the sky feeling completely relaxed. Jon was in the fire-hot pool so here I was, alone with my thoughts. It was just me, the sky, and the warm water. It was so peaceful. No cares, no worries about our roadtrip (since at the time we were en-route to our new residence in Washington from Texas), no thoughts of family. Nothing. It was just me...and...God? All of a sudden I felt so close to nature and God. All God. No words to speak. Just...God. My mind tried to make words out of what I was experiencing, tried to give thanks, tried to speak of the world as it was at that moment for me. But there was nothing. Just the sky, and the water, and God revealing His mighty presence to me. Jon's always told me how he feels infinitely close to God in the midst of nature and I never really truly understood what he meant until then. All of a sudden God and nature were real and close, I could've touched the sky and God with my finger, but I just lay there, caught up in the greatness of it all.

I'd seen many beautiful places before, but there was just something about that particular moment. I listened to a sermon this morning about a pastor who'd stayed in a ridiculously gorgeous 5-star hotel next to the ocean with manicured lawns, landscapes, and pools so beautiful it was like paradise on earth. The pastor went on to explain that we were made to experience beauty and enjoy the splendor of the earth. That was the way God intended it to be. He gave us nature to enjoy. I mean, think of Adam and Eve and the paradise that was the Garden of Eden before things went awry. Though we live in a crazy, chaotic world that went down the wrong path, there are still instinctive things within us that recognize what we were originally meant for. That's why moments like the one I experienced at the hot springs are so memorable. Those experiences stick out for a reason. We were made for greater things. And one of these days we'll experience it in heaven.