Old Perpetual Geyser

Old Perpetual rises from the middle of a pond on the grounds of Hunter’s Hot Springs Resort, off US 395 just north of Lakeview. Guests walk out to it from the lodge. Travel Southern Oregon describes a plume of 200-degree water thrown more than 60 feet into the air every 90 seconds, in season, and says the overflow fills the surrounding ponds, which draw many kinds of birds. In 2019 the Herald and News reported that the eruptions could be seen from Highway 395. A marker by the pond, reached from Geyser View Lane, reads: “A unique phenomena in the therapeutic mineral waters of the hot springs since 1923.” The resort plans a live webcam of the geyser, but it had not been installed when its website was last checked.

The pool, the pond, and the Geyser Room

Beside the geyser is a single outdoor pool kept at about 104°F. Hotel guests may soak at any hour. Day visitors buy passes at the restaurant beginning at 3 p.m. and change in dressing rooms with showers. Travel Oregon’s listing says that some call the waters healing. According to southernoregon.com, the springs on the property run from 185°F to 210°F. The water is alkaline and high in sulfate, and large bacterial mats grow in the channels that drain the springs. Those mats hold cyanobacteria that photosynthesize at unusually high temperatures. High Country News reported in 2011 that Richard Castenholz, a University of Oregon professor emeritus, had studied them for decades with National Science Foundation support.

The lodge has 12 rooms, and RVs and tents dry-camp on the grounds with round-the-clock use of the pool. The Geyser Room serves:

• rib eye with a baked or mashed potato
• three blackened fish tacos with taco slaw
• a wagyu burger, spelled “wagu” on the menu
• shepherd’s pie built on mashed potatoes and slow-cooked brisket
• schnitzel
• house-made jalapeño poppers

Happy hour runs from 4 to 6. The resort’s Facebook posts from fall 2026 describe football on the big screens, a family movie night, and a broccoli-cauliflower cheddar soup. Housewives Of Saint John played live on September 1, 2026. On October 2 the bar stayed open late and wished “all you hunters good fortune tomorrow for opening morning.” After sunset the guests look up into Lake County’s dark skies, where the resort promises the Milky Way, the planets, and an occasional aurora.

Harry Hunter’s wells

Trappers from the Hudson’s Bay Company found the springs in 1832 and wrote in their journals that the water was very hot. Harry Hunter, a land developer from Minnesota, visited the area in 1919. In 1923 he bought the 40 acres that held the springs and began a therapy, rest, and recuperation resort called Hunter’s Chlorine Hot Springs Club. According to southernoregon.com and a passage posted with the marker, he was not satisfied with how much hot water the springs produced on their own, so he had three wells drilled. All three erupted as hot-water geysers. Two died away. Old Perpetual kept going, every 40 to 120 seconds depending on the seasonal water table.

Other sources tell the beginning differently. The Oregonian and NPR, both in 2010, said the geyser sprang up in 1923 while developers were drilling wells among the hot pools for a resort. The Bend Bulletin, writing in 1990, placed it in the late 1920s. In that account, Lake County residents drilling a water well north of town struck a hot-water pocket at 23 feet. When they lowered an eight-inch pipe into the hole as casing, a geyser blasted into the air. They abandoned the well, the geyser became well known, and the restaurant and resort were eventually built around it.

The resort’s first building went up in 1925 and a second in 1926. In 1929 five doctors bought the springs and the club and opened a restaurant. One record names Dr. H. E. Kelty as the owner and operator of a sanitarium and hospital at Hunter’s. The property was sold in 1943, and the new owners added a motel and a cocktail lounge. In 2000 the owner renovated the resort and renamed it Geyser Hot Springs, according to southernoregon.com. The U.S. Geological Survey recognizes only the name Geyser Hunters Hot Springs, and locals have kept calling the place Hunter’s.

In 1959 the state geologist Norman V. Peterson wrote about the Hunter’s group in The Ore.-Bin, while describing a new geyser near Adel. He placed the springs at the base of the Goose Lake scarp and said its two well-made geysers “are probably ‘perpetual spouters.’” He called Old Perpetual “a familiar landmark in the Lakeview area” and gave its height as 50 to 60 feet. A second geyser, “The Teakettle,” stood to the east at the foot of the hill and had been capped to heat a housing development.

Into the mud, June 1990

On June 13, 1990, the geyser did not appear. “It just stopped,” said Harold Dilley, the resort manager. “It didn’t gradually quit, it just stopped all of a sudden.” He and the owner, John Howell, decided to drop a new casing down the well: a 15-foot length of 6-inch pipe.

First they drained the 100-foot pond, which left a mud bog around the wellhead. Dilley set out on foot. “I sunk up to my waist,” he told the Bulletin. “The mud was at a temperature of about 85 degrees, and the closer I got to the geyser, the warmer it got.” He turned back before he was burned. Next the two men drove a tractor out, its large tires riding on the mud, and began lowering the pipe with the front-end loader. “We got it in there about half-way and whammo! The geyser started spraying,” Dilley said. By the time they had the casing seated, both men were scalded by water at about 200 degrees.

That was June 22. Afterward, Dilley said, the geyser went off every 35 seconds instead of every 90, and he thought it climbed somewhat higher than its old 75 feet.

Old Sporadic and the town well

The geyser’s troubles had begun earlier. High Country News traces its quiet periods to 1978, when irrigation wells were first drilled in the area. That same year, a Lake County Examiner article joked that the name might have to change to “Old Sporadic.” For decades afterward it disappeared each summer while hayfields were being irrigated, then came back in the fall. “As the winter came on and the water table increased, then it would go off again and everybody would come here and be able to see it,” the resort’s manager, Jim Gullickson, told NPR in February 2010.

In the fall of 2009 it did not come back. By then the town had drilled a deep geothermal well nearby. Gullickson said it was less than 150 yards from the geyser, and High Country News put it at 200 yards. The well pulls 210-degree water to heat the new Warner Creek Correctional Facility and then returns the water to the ground. The resort’s owner, Steven Knobler of Auburn, California, told the Oregonian: “Half a dozen people a day in the summer come through and they say, ‘Where’s the geyser, where’s the geyser?’”

Chris Zinda, who lived at Hunter’s for three months after moving to Lakeview, suspected the town well. The Oregonian found him walking through clouds of buzzing midges beside the hot pools that ring the resort’s run-down buildings. “It’s conjecture on my part,” he said. “But it’s their project, so they are responsible for determining the impact.” Doug Young of the state Department of Corrections answered that the town’s well “does not touch any water above 157 feet below the ground.” The geyser’s own well is less than 100 feet deep. Darryl Anderson, the engineer who built the town well, offered another explanation: “It’s an old, old well” that feeds Old Perpetual, he said. “It could have caved in.” The town supervisor told NPR he suspected seismic activity. John Lund of the Oregon Institute of Technology explained how any geyser works: “It’s just like putting a pressure cooker on the stove and then pulling off the lid, and the lid is the column of water above the chamber.”

In September 2010 the town well’s pump failed. Gullickson, whom High Country News by then called the resort’s new owner, saw the springs rise three feet overnight. Zinda started a website, Save Hunter’s Hot Springs. Southernoregon.com reports that as of May 2015, Old Perpetual was erupting regularly again.

The Watsons and the Geyser Room

In February 2015, Sam Watson was shopping online for shipping containers when he came across a sale listing for the resort. The records disagree on when his family took over. One account says the Michael Watson family bought the property in 2017 and then remodeled the restaurant, repaired the motel and the grounds, and updated the kitchen and bar. Another says Sam, his father Mike, and partners Frank Gonzalez and Emily Noack officially took over at the end of January 2018, with Sam hoping to have the lodge, bar, and banquet room open by June 21. Michael Watson is named as owner and chef.

For a time the restaurant was the Neon Cowboy Roadhouse. Jenna Bauer tended bar, waited tables, and played the violin there, and the manager, Michael Zirbes, played drums, with Marty Chaloupka and Randy Dary also performing. In September 2026 the resort announced on Facebook: “Neon Cowboy is gone. The Geyser Room is here.”