Calistoga Mud Baths

Treatments also available at:

Golden Haven Spa - Nestled in the heart of the Napa Valley, in the beautiful town of Calistoga, Golden Haven Hot Springs makes the perfect wine country getaway. Come and experience the magic of the healing mineral waters and rejuvenating spa treatments. After a day of touring the wine country, you can swim in our warm mineral pool, relax on the sun deck, and rejuvenate with Golden Haven’s famous spa treatments. At Golden Haven couples can enjoy mud baths in private treatment rooms. We also feature soothing massages, luxurious herbal facials, and detoxifying European Body Wraps. Come for the day or stay for the night in one our newly remodeled rooms. Many have private kitchenettes, saunas or hot mineral jauzzis. Families may prefer our two bedroom units that accommodate up to four people. Come and see for yourself why Conde Nest Traveler recently highlighted Golden Haven’s Mud Bath treatments as a “quintessential American travel experience” and why Travel and Leisure Magazine in April 2007 concluded that Golden Haven Hot Springs is one of the most professional and up-to-date" spas in Calistoga. Special Internet package discounts are available on our web site

Baths at Roman Spa
Calistoga Village Inn & Spa
Dr. Wilkenson's Resort
Golden Haven Spa
Indian Springs Spa

Mud History
Calistoga and mud go way back - Mud baths -- said to relax muscles, sooth aches, improve circulation and smooth the skin -- have been a visitor staple in Calistoga ever since Sam Brannan reined in the thermal springs at the foot of Mount St. Helena and opened his Calistoga Hot Springs Resort in the 1860s. Spa after spa followed; today there are more than a dozen, making Calistoga the most spa-ified town in the West. "In the natural state, what we had around here was hot springs bubbling up all around. When they put wells down for swimming pools, it concentrated it, and the hot springs were lost," said John Merchant, whose Indian Springs Spa and Resort stands on the site of Brannan's fashionable 19th century watering hole.

Until rather recently, mud baths were promoted as an arthritis treatment. They entail lying for 10 to 15 minutes in a sarcophagus like tub filled with mud made from hot-spring water mixed with volcanic ash, peat moss, clay or other materials, depending on the spa.

"The mud bath is done in Japan, it's done in Europe -- it's a very old procedure," Merchant said. "In the 1930s and '40s, people with arthritis would come here, take a mud bath every day and come away feeling healed."

Nowadays, mud baths are generally included in a larger course of treatment aimed primarily at reducing stress and promoting relaxation. Though it sounds, well, dirty, mud baths actually are quite sanitary, spa operators say. Brochures from the establishments that offer them explain that mud in the tubs is pumped through with 212-degree water and thoroughly raked between customers.

Indian Springs -- which locals persist in calling Pachita's, after a previous owner -- remains the classic place to go for "the works," followed by a swim in a magnificent, 60-by-120-foot, geyser-heated swimming pool dating from 1913.
The Sacramento Bee, May 18, 1997

Whose idea was this? - It was the novelty of sitting in hot mud that first put Calistoga on the map. Hot mud and even hotter salesmanship. Although Native Americans and early Spanish settlers used the area's natural hot springs, it took a fast-talking, big-dreaming entrepreneur named Sam Brannan to turn geyser water into gold.After making a fortune selling shovels to prospectors during the Gold Rush, Brannan snapped up the steaming geysers and hot marshlands at the northern end of the Napa Valley with the idea of creating a resort modeled on New York's famous Saratoga Hot Springs.

Although no records remain, local legend has it that Brannan was the first to mix volcanic ash from nearby Mount St. Helena with hot mineral water to concoct Calistoga's famous mud baths. He opened his Hot Springs Hotel in 1860, promoting it as the "Saratoga of California." One evening over supper, apparently after amply enjoying the fruits of his own nearby vineyards, he held forth on this theme a bit too intensely, proclaiming, "I will make this place the Calistoga of Sarafornia."

Calistoga stuck, and for 10 years Brannan's resort attracted the likes of Leland Stanford, Robert Louis Stevenson, and P. T. Barnum. In 1870, a divorce settlement put Brannan out of business, and fire later razed most of the Hot Springs Hotel. By the 1920s, other resorts offering mud baths had been built, but it wasn't until the early 1950s that Calistoga's reputation as a thermal destination really began to grow. Today seven spas offer traditional mud baths, and four others offer a variety of New Age treatments.