female announcer: It's hard to believe, but Los Angeles was once covered with thermal springs.

Today, if you want to soak in nature's hot tubs, you'll have to trek far from any city.

And they aren't easy to find.

So, discover with us the geological, botanical, and cultural history of these natural marvels, the original fountains of youth.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropy.

♪♪♪ Dani Rosenberg: My first time going to hot springs was when I was like 18, fresh out of high school.

My friend, he was like this hippy dippy dude, and he knew about these hot springs up in Ojai.

We get there, it's pitch black.

We pull over.

And I remember the first time smelling the hot springs, which it's sulfur.

It smells like rotten eggs.

And I was like, "Oh, my gosh.

Like, this is gonna be gross.

Like, I'm about to go into rotten eggs.

Like, I'm gonna stink."

We get down.

There's some, like, lit little tea light candles, and you can't really see, but you can still hear, and I remember getting in and just being like, "This is great."

It was just complete quiet.

You could only hear the river down below, and you could just see the fog kind of rolling in over the trees.

These hot springs are just also located in the most beautiful places, as well.

The scenery is really magical and beautiful.

Looking up at the stars, the stars in Ojai are amazing.

The reason I find hot springs magical is they bring loved ones together, friends, you have a good time, and the sense of like being one with nature.

♪♪♪ Dani: This is what it's about, just being in the moment, right now, right then and there in the hot springs.

announcer: Hot springs and their many benefits have long been an integral part of indigenous American culture.

Dr. Sean C. Milanovich: For us as Cahuilla people, specifically Se-Khi, we regard these places as sacred.

[speaking native language] Sean Milanovich, and I am from the village of Se-Khi or Agua Caliente as it's known today.

Where I am from, from Se-Khi, the people settled around a really large hot spring, and hot springs are not only sources of water to drink, places where you can get in and take a bath, but there's a huge spiritual component to the water.

So, I'm gonna tell you about the origin of our spring at Se-Khi Agua Caliente.

It was long ago after the migration and the people were first coming back to settle in our area.

It was Sungrey.

He had been migrating his entire life, and his body was worn out and tired.

And so he took his who ya no hut, his sacred staff, and he thrust it down into the ground, and that's where the spring came up, this mineral hot spring, and it rejuvenated his body.

After sitting in that spring, he was able to move on down the valley on his journey.

And so that's the origin of our spring at Se-Khi.

William Contreras: My clan is from that area right over there.

So, when we came down--we're originally from the Santa Rosa Mountains.

It was just all just, you know, still flooded, and they were just following the shoreline.

And we call that village Túva, and that's the most southern, southeast village of our tribe.

In Tuva as well we had a hot springs there.

And in each of these hot springs there's deities.

In our hot springs, we have a deity, and it was a little girl, and her name is called Náwal-e-e. And the name púul, which we call our medicine people, they would go inside there and dive into the waters, and go and converse with her to obtain just different knowledges, maybe a way to cure certain ailments and things like that.

But that was in our hot springs of Tuva.

Sean: For us, as Cahuilla people, and specifically Se-Khi, we see it as portals to the spirit world.

You can go into that spring, dive down into that water, and you can go into this chamber that's down there, this underwater chamber, and talk to these creatures, and these are the Núqatem.

They live inside the spring.

The medicine men would go inside, and they would ask the nookatim for help.

William: For us, we know all these hot springs are connected, so our púul would go into the spring, and then just follow it somehow in some channel.

We call it púax-a, and it would shoot them to Se-Khi, which is the hot springs in Palm Springs.

Sean: You can come up to another spring in Northern California.

So, the hot springs are the underground spiritual highway for the medicine people.

announcer: By the turn of the 20th century, hot spring resorts had bubbled up all across the L.A. basin.

Patt Morrison: In the 1880s, there was Gilman Hot Springs out in San Jacinto, that became an object of tourist attention.

♪♪♪ Patt: By this time, the hot springs were appearing in tourist books at a time when people had to travel long, hard miles by horse and wagon to get to these places.

They couldn't just roll up the windows and turn on the AC and zip out to the hot springs for the weekend.

So, they must have been good enough that it was worth the trip.

Here's another look at Gilman Hot Springs.

So, they were so prosperous that they not only had the hot springs, they wanted to offer other attractions to people, and these beautiful gardens.

My gosh, they're sort of semitropical and very lush.

The people could wander around between sips of stinky sulfur water, I guess.

The idea of enjoying the waters was such an attraction that on New Year's Day 1903, thousands of Angelinos got aboard the street car lines to go out to something called Bimini Baths.

Now, the Bimini Baths weren't the only ones, but they were the biggest.

They were on Vermont between First and Third in what is modern-day Koreatown, and the facility was immense.

They built what they called a natatorium, which is a fancy word for a swimming pool, essentially, which had water that moved at hundreds of gallons a minute into pools, into ponds where they could drink the water--or, of course, they could if they were daring, take the plunge.

Of course, they had separate ladies and gentlemen's facilities, because it would've been too, too much to see bare ankles together.

But this was an immense recreational facility, and Angelinos came from all over town to enjoy themselves here.

♪♪♪ Patt: In 1910, in a wheat field near Beverly and Western, they found hot springs, Oxford Hot Springs.

And unlike most of them, this one is still producing.

It produces for a spa, a hot water spa in Koreatown, which, if it is to be found at all, it's where you'll find a legacy of Los Angeles hot springs.

From the time the Portolá Expedition came here in 1769, it marveled at how much water there was in Los Angeles.

This was August 1769, and they kept walking across southern California and Los Angeles and found little stream beds.

They found marshes.

This was a very water rich area then, and you couldn't really sell land that was marshy or that had seasonal streams running through it.

And so around 1920, the city fathers started covering up these waterways, started filling in these wet patches, so people could sell it as real estate.

And the water courses that supplied these hot springs really disappeared.

If you live in Los Angeles now, and you're new to Los Angeles, you would never know that these places existed.

You would never know about hot springs within the city limits of Los Angeles.

There's only one place, a little park called Bimini Slough, which commemorates and memorializes this part of Los Angeles history with the name Bimini and the idea that the waters there were fresh and free-running and pretty darn hot, once upon a time.

announcer: So, how do they work?

What happens underground to create thermal springs?

Professor Jean-Philippe Avouac: Earthquakes brought me to America.

It's paradise for people who study earthquake like me.

♪♪♪ Jean-Philippe: So, here you have my earthquake machine.

So, this is a system that we use to demonstrate the principle of the earthquake.

Here you have the slider.

Here you have a rubber band, which we stretch, and this is going to be the source of elastic strength that will actually be transferred into motion of the slider.

Slowly--and here you have the earthquake.

So, to get hot springs, you need two things.

You need a source of heat, and you need a pathway for the fruits to come to the surface.

So, you can have this combination in the active volcanic system.

In California, you also have magmatic activity.

You have places in southern California, all the geysers.

Not too far from San Francisco, where it's related to magmatic activity, So, here you have the topography of California.

And what you immediately see here is that sharp fissure cutting across that landscape.

This is the San Andreas fault.

Where you have active faults, you're shearing the rocks at that, and the rest of the fissure is to produce some heat, just like when you rub your hands, you can feel the heat that is generated.

So, the same thing happens with rocks.

Where it's known to be associated with hot spring would be more in the Owens Valley area, You have hot springs where you have a place where there is heat produced at that pathway, from fruits come to the surface.

And the hot spring can be a blessing.

So, I got interested in hot springs at the time I was working in the Himalaya.

And they are beautiful places.

You see the life of all the villagers.

You see the family bringing their kids, and it's a wonderful thing to visit in Nepal.

When we started studying the Himalayan system, one thing we noticed that was very intriguing is that you have more earthquakes in the winter than in the summer.

In the winter, it's dry, and the aquifers are going to drop down.

The ground is going to drop down, as well, and that's going to push back in contraction the range, and it will drive more earthquakes.

And especially, we were convinced, that we started to put GPS instruments in the Himalaya to measure the deformation, because those instruments were also showing that actually the deformation of the ground, we have more contraction of the range in the winter than in the summer, and actually this is related to climate.

This is related to the monsoon in Asia.

And this is all driven by the California monsoon.

It's not possible, at the moment, from a scientific point of view or technical point of view to promise that there will be no earthquake larger than the certain magnitude.

So, the risk won't be zero.

And so it's a political decision to decide whether this risk is acceptable or not.

♪♪♪ announcer: The water resulting from this geological activity was long touted as a miracle cure, and that's no different today.

Dr. Ian Butler: So, hot springs have actual medical benefit, right, recognized by western medicine.

Chronic pain syndromes, which we don't understand, get better in the hot springs, as well, chronic back pain.

A lot of times there's 100 things that can cause that.

We don't know what they are.

This is an area of active research.

Probably in the last 15 years, it's gotten more active, I think, as people started to recognize that this isn't just a relaxing experience.

There's some anti-inflammatory properties in this water.

William: All these hot springs are created for the people, for us to cure ourselves.

So, we all visit them 'cause they're holy waters.

Sean: Twenty-some years ago, when I was going to Haskell Indian University out in Kansas, I crushed my hip.

The doctor said I was never, ever gonna walk again.

My leg was paralyzed.

After being in the hospital, I came home.

My dad took me to the hot mineral water, and he said, "Sean, I want you to get healed."

So, I spent a month in that water.

And after a month, I started having feeling in my toes where I had no feeling at all before.

I started moving my toes, and then, you know, I was able to bend my leg a little bit.

After a couple more weeks, I was able to, you know, full motion in my leg.

I owe everything to that spring.

I believe in the power in it, that it heals people.

Dr. Butler: FDR, our longest--our only four-term president, really well-liked guy in his political career.

As an adult, he came down with some paralytic illness.

At the time, they called it polio.

Looking back, maybe it was Guillain-Barre syndrome.

Whatever it was, after three years and losing the ability to walk, he goes to these hot springs and finds healing there.

So impressed by it, he actually took all of his life savings, bought a hotel, and created a spa for polio victims.

Later on, he becomes governor, then president, devotes federal resources towards this sort of thing.

♪♪♪ Dr. Butler: And it was something that he was passionate about even before he was president.

♪♪♪ announcer: And generations later, people still visit as a balm for body and soul.

John Aherns: I've been coming here since 2015.

When I came up here, I'd retired as a special ed teacher of high school, autistic students in San Diego, Encinitas.

And I got really severe arthritis from working in a building that had black mold in it, and I was crippled, and I could hardly walk.

About 2017, I had operations on my two knees that had arthritis in them.

And I used to come down here for my knees, for the arthritis.

And then after I had my operation, it was like healing waters.

And right after that, I did 12 days floating down the Grand Canyon, 'cause my knees got so good.

And so I really believe in the miracle healing qualities of these waters.

♪♪♪ Dr. Butler: So, there was this health craze around the turn of the century focused on these waters.

A lot of tourism opened up.

A lot of people had come for healing.

Patt: Now, the name Bimini was the name of a chain of islands in the Bahamas, and it was supposedly where Ponce de León stopped in his search for the Fountain of Youth.

Dr. Butler: I mean, if you think back, Ponce de León looking for the Fountain of Youth.

And so there are studies taking psoriasis patients and comparing them, either putting them in just a hot bath or a hot springs bath, and then mixing that with phototherapy.

So, you know, sun or light.

The patients in the hot springs, their healing is actually statistically significant.

Modern science is showing anti-inflammatory aspects of this water, you know, health benefits of this water.

There is truth that there is healing in the hot springs.

♪♪♪ Dr. Butler: One other thing to consider would be if you have an allergy to sulfur, you know, there's a fair amount of sulfur in a lot of these waters.

You know you can smell it when you go there.

And so, if you get in the water, and you see you're having an allergic reaction to the water, get out.

You know, one thing to remember when visiting these hot springs is not to let your head go under the water--in particular, your nose.

announcer: To ensure continued access by visitors, groups of volunteers across the state clean and maintain the springs.

They call themselves angels.

John: And then the people that built all these tubs have continued to come here.

They clean up, usually, after the weekend, when a lot of people from out of town come in here and don't really respect the place.

♪♪♪ Dani: Trash, pack in, pack out, or just don't pack in anything at all, just what you have on, and that's it.

If you have to go to the bathroom, walk far, far away, 300 feet in my eyes.

Just keep going until you can't see anything or anyone, keep going.

John: You know, carry your trash out, keep it clean, you know, just respect it.

For us to all survive as human beings, we need to keep it cleaned up, so that the water is clean, you know.

announcer: Hot springs affect not only those who sit inside them.

They also shape and impact surrounding flora and fauna.

Alexander Christensen: It so happens that because we're in these mixing zones, and hot springs are often indicative of ecological mixing zones, you have extraordinary diversity of plants.

Some of the plants that occur around hot springs include deer grass, basket rush, edible plants like chaparral, yucca, monkey flower, and medicinal plants like yerba santa, yerba mansa, and creosote.

This is California buckeye, really cool tree.

It's indicative of the Sierra Nevada.

One of the ecosystems that are melding together here--and I mean, beyond being beautiful, this was a really important plant for the native people of California, because they would use the toxins that are present in the seed, the saponin, to stun fish.

They'd throw the nuts into the river and stun fish and collect the fish with the saponin that they extracted from the nut.

Not only that, they could also then eat the nut, because after soaking in the stream it would leach the saponin out, and then it was an important source of carbohydrates and nutrients.

Sean: Along this mountain right here, they made these fish traps, and they were probably 9 feet long.

They'd come down like a U, and then at the bottom there would be an opening where the fish would be able to come in.

The Cahuilla, they'd throw the buckeye inside, and it would turn the water all milky.

That would help them really get disoriented, and then they would use spears, or they would use nets to catch the fish.

♪♪♪ Alexander: An example of this being sort of a sanctuary for unique species from the central valley, you have 20 species of dragonfly and 12 species of damselflies, which find refuge from all of the disturbance that's occurred in the valley grasslands below.

The perennial wetlands that were there were drained and highly disturbed by agricultural activities.

Here on the Kern River, there's a place where they haven't been so significantly disturbed, where they continue to occur.

♪♪♪ Brenda Gutierrez: I started going into hot springs as a kid, going to my town, in fact, in Mexico named Acatic, Jalisco.

And during our vacations, we would go to this place called Yahualica.

But they were manmade pools, but the water was hot springs.

And as a kid, I just remember, I was like, "Oh, the water is so hot.

Why is it so hot?"

Alexander: Ah!

Ooh.

Brenda: It just brings me back to those childhood memories of, you know, hanging out with my cousins and, you know, going to Mexico and just saying, "Let's go to the hot springs."

It's such a beautiful memory, and now that I'm older, I really appreciate getting out of the city and just getting to know more of the natural aspects of it.

Dani: I feel like when I'm there, there is a connection.

I'm more relaxed and open.

These hot springs are like from mother nature, and it's a safety net, having clothes on, to being able to take it off there and just be one with nature is a total cool thing.

Alexander: Hot springs are a gift of the land itself and should be treated as such.

John: The water has a healing quality.

It's magical.

It's from the mother earth.

Alexander: The best we can do is show our gratitude.

And if we don't cherish these places, we might lose touch with really what it is to have a culture, to have a relationship with the earth.

♪♪♪ announcer: Just as tectonic plates converge at hot springs, so do myth and science, so do spirituality, health, and recreation.

William: Pál-qáwis e-náqal-a kind of means a sound that the water made when it was going over the waters.

♪♪♪ William: Pál means water.

Qáwis is the rocks, water going over the rocks.

And e-náqala is kind of referring to what you're hearing when you see that.

♪♪♪ announcer: These thermal waters help Southern Californians connect to the earth today, just as they did millennia ago.

Patt: Hot springs are the product of our kinetic landscape underfoot, of methane, and earthquakes, and old volcanic residue that sometimes here and there steam up really hot, cozy, comforting water.

♪♪♪ Dani: Being in these waters is beautiful.

announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropy.

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