Spring Hill Spring

Water runs from three open spigots and a full running sink beside Montana Highway 1, on the grade west of Anaconda toward Georgetown Lake. The supply stands about 20 feet south of the pavement at about 6,210 feet. People drive out from town to fill jugs here, and long-haul traffic stops for it too. The spring is open year round. Discover Anaconda, the town’s tourism office, says it was “built in the ‘40s so nobody had to pass through thirsty,” and adds that “most people fly past it on their way to Georgetown Lake without ever knowing it’s there.”

Three spigots on Spring Hill

The sources place it differently. Discover Anaconda and a 2024 listing on the website Find A Spring put it about five miles west of Anaconda. The Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) puts it 8 miles west, at milepost 19.8 in Deer Lodge County. The Find A Spring directions, posted by contributors signing as Sarah & Aaron, warn that “signs don’t point at water source.” They describe it this way. Round the bend to a long straight uphill stretch, where the road splits from a single lane each way into a slow-vehicle lane, the only part of the road to Georgetown Lake that does so. At the top of the straight, on the left, stands a tourist sign about one of the local mountains. Just past that turnout a road leaves to the left, and the spring lies about 300 feet past the turnoff. They write that any vehicle can get in, “from semi to the smallest of automobiles.” They confirmed the directions as accurate in March 2024.

Comments on that page record the stop over the years. In 2014 a visitor named Linda J wrote, “There are 3 fountains to get water out of. So tasty and a safe place to get out, since it is off the main road.” In August 2017 a commenter, RonT, called it “some of the coldest and purest water I’ve ever found” and noted a historical marker at the site recording when the spring access was established. A month later another visitor asked whether he could fill a 350-gallon tank mounted on a trailer.

A pipe under the highway

The spigots are the end of a pipe. A September 2011 assessment by the engineer Kolten Knatterud of Territorial-Landworks in Missoula, prepared under contract with the Montana Department of Transportation (MDT), traced the line north from the spigots, under the scenic turnout and Highway 1, toward a source “that could not be identified.” The spring box sits within about 20 feet of the highway right-of-way, and the water flows about 20 feet south from it. The report counted four spigots there, three of them flowing on the day of the site visit.

The spring lies in the Cable Creek drainage just east of Silver Lake. The report found Quaternary valley fill and Pleistocene glacial deposits around the spring and undifferentiated Cambrian bedrock in the hills just north. It found no information on which of these feeds the spring. Discover Anaconda puts it more simply: the water comes “straight off the mountain,” filtering down through the Anaconda Range.

The water receives no treatment. When the 2011 investigators asked about this, the MDT representative on site said he believed it was because of the age of the source and the absence of any record of biological contamination. A preliminary assessment found the spring may be under the direct influence of surface water and recommended further study. Under state rules it is a transient, non-community water supply, one that serves at least 25 people a day for six months a year without regularly serving the same people. It is tested for total coliform each quarter and for nitrate once a year. As of the 2011 report, no coliform sample had come back positive since the beginning of 2006, and nitrate readings ran from 0.11 to 0.196 parts per million. There is no flowmeter and no count of daily visits.

MDT has built a concrete barricade at the edge of the turnout, strung a silt fence, and sealed and locked the spring-box lid. The 2011 report noted that the box’s northwest corner sat below grade, with minor surface water and debris getting in, and recommended raising the box at least 24 inches. Within a mile the report listed cabins on septic systems, campground vault toilets, a former underground storage tank site about 300 feet west, removed in 1990 with no sign of leaking, and an abandoned mine about 2,400 feet north in what it called the Spring Hill Silver Lake district. The report also says the spring is piped to a neighboring Fish, Wildlife and Parks campground.

Since the forties

Discover Anaconda and the Find A Spring contributors both date the spring’s setup, spigots included, to the 1940s. The name had settled on the surrounding hillside by 1979. That summer Ed Kemmick, then an intern in the Anaconda bureau of the Montana Standard, wrote a notice that the Sons of Norway, Ryvingen Lodge 136, planned to meet on the first Sunday of August at the home of Burton Colwell, “at Spring Hill west of Anaconda.” In the same period Bill and Bette Colvin, married in 1973 at Georgetown, made their home in Anaconda and spent summers camping and serving as campground hosts at Spring Hill Campground. After eleven years they moved to Idaho Falls.

That campground is run today by the Forest Service’s Pintler Ranger District, about 11 miles west of Anaconda on Highway 1. It has 15 camping units in lodgepole pine, a day-use picnic area, and potable water, and it is open mid-May through mid-September, weather permitting.

The road has drawn its own studies. The DEQ’s 2011 report cites an earlier assessment of the same supply dated July 2001. A corridor study completed for MDT in September 2011 noted that Highway 1 is designated the Pintler Veterans’ Memorial Scenic Highway, though roadside signs still called it the Pintler Scenic Route. It listed the Spring Hill Road intersection at reference post 19.9 as the access to recreation areas and “a local water spring,” and recommended realigning and paving Spring Hill Road where it meets the highway. The same study recorded frequent moose collisions between Silver Lake and Georgetown Lake.

In February 2023 the Anaconda Leader printed a recipe for Montana sourdough from Steve Murphy. Under ingredients he listed: “Pure water (I use Spring Hill water). Tap water has chlorine which is an enemy to sourdough starter.”