Miette Hot Springs

Fifty-two degrees out of the ground, the hottest water in the Rockies

Miette Hot Springs are the hottest springs in the Canadian Rockies, in Jasper National Park between the towns of Hinton and Jasper, at the end of the 17 km seasonal Miette Road that leaves Highway 16 near the park's east gate, 61 km east of the Jasper townsite. Parks Canada gives the water at 54 °C as it flows from the mountain. That is far too hot to sit in, so it is cooled to about 40 °C for the two hot pools, with two cold plunge pools of different temperatures beside them, all outdoors and looking over the Fiddle River valley.

The source is three springs and several minor seeps above the ruins of the 1938 pool. David M. Baird measured the hottest at about 52 °C in 1963, and the average at the surface is 51.2 °C, but the temperature swings by as much as 20 °C through the year as spring snowmelt mixes with the water underground and cools it. The water is rich in sulphate, carbonate, strontium and calcium.

In the 19th century Indigenous people showed fur traders the springs on Sulphur Creek. In the 1910s the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway meant to make them a great resort in the style of the Banff Springs Hotel and engaged the architect Francis Rattenbury to design it. The plan died three ways: the First World War broke out, the railway went insolvent, and its general manager, Charles Melville Hays, went down with the Titanic. By 1919 there was only a rough trail and a few modest structures, used by workers from the Pocahontas coal camp down the valley.

The springs were finally opened up by the Great Depression. In 1934 the federal government began an automobile road and a pool as a relief project, finished in 1938, and by 1962 a National Parks Branch pamphlet listed a large pool, plunges, steam-rooms and dressing rooms. The road is narrow and winding, and trailers and large motorhomes have to stop at Miette Campground. The pools close each autumn, and Parks Canada's own page gives the season's opening and closing dates.