Living in Trimble, Colorado: The Hot Springs Corner of the Animas Valley

Drive north out of Durango on a January morning, right around seven, and you’ll see it before you see the turn. Steam. A low white column rising off the valley floor east of the highway, catching the first light coming over the Hermosa Cliffs. That’s Trimble.

Most people know the name because of the hot springs. Fair enough. But Trimble is also a place people live, and it has been for about a century and a half, which makes it one of the older inhabited spots in the north Animas Valley. It isn’t a town. There’s no city council, no Trimble post office anymore, no welcome sign. What there is: a highway intersection, a soaking resort, a golf course, a market, and a scatter of homes on land that was pasture within living memory.

Here’s the thing about Trimble. Folks around here use the word loosely. Ask three people where Trimble is and you’ll get three different boundaries. So let’s start there.

Where Trimble Actually Is

Trimble sits roughly eight miles north of downtown Durango. The anchor point is the intersection of US Highway 550 and Trimble Lane, with County Road 203 running parallel to the highway on the east side of the valley. Durango Hot Springs Resort and Spa puts its own address at 6475 County Road 203 and describes itself as eight miles north of downtown and fifteen miles south of Purgatory. That’s your mile marker.

Head north from Trimble and you’re into Hermosa within a couple minutes. Head south and the valley opens up through the Animas Valley proper toward Durango. East across the river is Dalton Ranch. West of the highway, the ground climbs fast toward the Falls Creek area and the national forest boundary.

So when someone says they live in Trimble, they usually mean one of a few things: a home along County Road 203, something off Trimble Lane, or a place in the Dalton Ranch subdivision that shares the same mailing corridor. Nobody’s wrong. The lines are soft.

The valley floor here sits at roughly 6,500 feet, a couple hundred feet below downtown Durango. That matters more than you’d think, and we’ll come back to it.

The Hot Springs, Then and Now

Frank Trimble arrived in the area in 1874, according to the Animas Museum, and he was not a well man. Rheumatism, plus injuries from his time in the Indian Wars in Oregon. He started bathing in the geothermal water bubbling out of the valley floor and, a month later, declared himself healed. Whether you buy that or not, he bought the ground.

Trimble built the first hotel on the property in 1882. It burned. He replaced it with a three-story brick building in 1896, renamed Hermosa House, which had a bathhouse, a saloon, a billiard hall and a dance hall. That burned too, in 1931. The bathhouse burned in 1938. The main building burned in 1957. Read the Animas Museum’s timeline and you start to suspect the place was simply cursed with regard to fire.

The bones survived anyway. In the winters of the early days, Durango folks would ice skate up the frozen Animas to Trimble, warm up with cocoa, then skate home. In 1950 a Hollywood crew filming A Ticket to Tomahawk stayed at the hotel, and one of the guests was an unknown actress named Marilyn Monroe.

The property changed hands in 2019 and got a new name. The Durango Herald reported at the time that the buyers planned to replace the structurally failed Olympic-sized pool and rebrand the place as Durango Hot Springs, largely so out-of-towners would understand where it was. They did both.

Today the resort runs 32 mineral soaking pools, split between family-friendly and adult-only sides, plus two cold plunges, a 25-meter swimming pool, and five private cedar ofuro tubs, per the resort’s own site. Locals have opinions about the transformation. Some miss the scruffy old Trimble with its lawn and its two pools. Some go every week now.

What nobody argues about: on a January Tuesday at nine in the morning, when it’s fourteen degrees and the steam is so thick you can’t see the person across the pool from you, it is one of the better things about living in this valley.

What Living Here Looks Like Day to Day

Trimble Crossing is the commercial corner at the entrance to Dalton Ranch, and it’s the entire retail life of the area. PJ’s Market for groceries you forgot, a liquor store, a hardware store, a few other tenants that turn over. That’s it. Everything else is a drive.

Which means: you go to Durango. City Market is fifteen minutes. Walmart is twenty. The kids’ orthodontist, the bank, the good coffee, all south. People who live up here get very good at batching errands.

Mornings, you’ll see a lot of the same faces. Dog walkers on the shoulder of CR 203. Cyclists heading north toward Hermosa on the highway, which is a nerve-wracking stretch and always has been. School buses. The Durango and Silverton train runs through the valley on the east side, and in summer you can set your watch by it, twice each direction, blowing the whistle at the crossings.

Evenings are quiet. Really quiet. The highway noise carries less than you’d expect once you’re a few hundred yards off it, and the dark is real dark. That’s the trade.

Housing: What Actually Exists

There’s no single Trimble neighborhood. What you’ll find, broadly:

Older valley homes on acreage. Ranch houses and log homes on one to ten acres, many built in the sixties through the eighties, sitting on old irrigated pasture. Some have water rights attached. Some have barns that are worth more than the house.
Dalton Ranch homes. The golf course subdivision, with an HOA, city-adjacent utilities, and a much more suburban feel than the acreage around it.
Newer custom builds. Scattered along CR 203 and up the side draws, mostly from the nineties on, often with the big view windows facing the cliffs.
Manufactured and mobile homes. More of these than the marketing photos suggest, particularly on the smaller lots. Financing on some of them is its own conversation.

What you won’t find is much of anything under an acre outside of Dalton Ranch. And you won’t find sidewalks.

Wells, Septic, and Water You Should Ask About

This is the part I’d want a friend to tell me before they told me about the hot springs.

Most homes outside the subdivisions here are on well and septic. The Animas Valley aquifer is generally productive, and shallow wells are common, but “generally” is doing real work in that sentence. Well permits in Colorado come with use limitations, and a permit that allows household use only is not the same as one that lets you irrigate two acres of pasture and water four horses. People find this out after closing. Every year. It’s the single most common expensive surprise in the north valley, and it’s entirely avoidable with a permit review during due diligence. We wrote a longer piece on water rights and wells in Southwest Colorado if you want the full version.

Septic is the other one. La Plata County has its own onsite wastewater rules, and an inspection at transfer is standard practice. Old systems on old lots near a river are exactly what you’d think.

And the river. Parts of the valley floor sit in mapped floodplain. Not most of it, but enough of it that you check. Insurance carriers check too, and they’ve gotten pickier.

The Commute, and the Highway

Downtown Durango is about twelve to fifteen minutes in normal conditions. Call it twenty if you’re going to the south side of town or the hospital campus. That’s a real commute, but it’s an easy one, and it’s mostly beautiful.

Highway 550 through the valley is two lanes with a center turn lane in stretches and no shoulder to speak of in others. Winter mornings, the valley floor holds ice where the sun hasn’t hit yet, especially in the shadow of the cliffs. Deer cross at dusk. Elk cross at dusk. There’s an occasional bear. Drive it for a season and you’ll adjust your speed without thinking about it.

Summer weekends the road fills with tourists heading to Purgatory, Silverton, and the Million Dollar Highway. Leaf season is worse. If you hate traffic, understand that four or five weekends a year the trip to town takes half again as long.

Seasons in the North Valley

Trimble is colder than Durango. Not by much on paper, but reliably. Cold air drains down the valley overnight and pools on the floor, so a January morning that’s eighteen degrees downtown can be four or five degrees up here. Gardeners lose tomatoes to a September frost while friends in town are still picking. Locals call it the cold sink and treat it as fact.

Snow: less than Purgatory, more than town, and it lingers on north-facing ground. Plowing on the county roads is decent. Plowing on your driveway is your problem.

Monsoon season, roughly July into early September, brings afternoon thunderstorms that build over the La Platas and come across the valley around two or three in the afternoon. They’re loud, they’re brief, and they’re the reason the valley is green in August.

Fall is why people stay. The cottonwoods along the river go gold in the second and third weeks of October, usually, and the elk come down out of the high country. Big herds move through the golf course and the pastures. If you’ve never watched a couple hundred elk cross a fairway at first light, it’s worth a cold morning.

Who Trimble Suits

It suits people who want valley ground, room for horses or a shop, and a short drive to a real town. It suits people who like the idea of soaking in mineral water at nine at night in the snow. It suits people who don’t mind driving.

It does not suit people who want to walk to a coffee shop. Or people who need fiber internet without doing any homework first, because service quality here varies block by block and the marketing maps lie. Or people who want a small yard and no maintenance, unless they’re buying in Dalton Ranch specifically.

To be fair, plenty of folks land here for the acreage and stay for the neighbors. It’s an unpretentious stretch of valley. People help each other pull cars out of ditches.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Trimble a town?

No. Trimble is an unincorporated area in the north Animas Valley, about eight miles north of downtown Durango in La Plata County. There is no municipal government, no town limits, and no separate town services. Addresses are typically Durango, Colorado.

How far is Trimble from downtown Durango?

About eight miles by road, which works out to roughly twelve to fifteen minutes in normal driving conditions. Purgatory Resort sits about fifteen miles north of Trimble on Highway 550.

Are the Trimble hot springs still called Trimble Hot Springs?

Not officially. The property was sold in 2019 and renamed Durango Hot Springs Resort and Spa. Long-time locals still call it Trimble, and probably always will.

Do homes in Trimble have city water?

Most homes outside of subdivisions are on private wells and septic systems. Well permits carry specific use limitations, so anyone buying acreage should review the permit and any decreed water rights during due diligence rather than assuming irrigation or livestock use is allowed.

Is Trimble colder than Durango?

Usually, yes. Cold air drains down the valley overnight and settles on the valley floor, so overnight lows on the north valley floor often run several degrees colder than downtown Durango. The practical effect is a shorter growing season and more ice on shaded roads in the morning.

What schools serve the Trimble area?

The area falls within Durango School District 9-R, with Animas Valley Elementary as the neighborhood elementary school for much of the north valley. School boundaries do change, so confirm the current assignment for a specific address with the district before you buy.

Is there flood risk in the Animas Valley near Trimble?

Portions of the valley floor sit within mapped floodplain. Not all of it, and not most homes, but enough that a floodplain determination belongs in your due diligence. Insurance carriers have become more particular about this in recent years.

One Last Thing

Trimble rewards people who do their homework. The well permit, the floodplain map, the septic inspection, the actual internet speed at the actual address. None of that is glamorous, and all of it decides whether you love the place in year three.

If you’re looking at property in the north Animas Valley and you’d like someone who has driven every one of those side roads in February, the team at Blackmore Group Realty is around, and happy to talk it through before you fall in love with a view.

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