Lifestyle

How a forgotten California border town became a hip hideaway — with hot springs and music

Published

1 year ago

October 25, 2024

How a forgotten California border town became a hip hideaway — with hot springs and music

The first two surprises, as you roll up Old Highway 80 into this dry and silent Sonoran Desert town, might be the steam and the music.

The steam rises from two pools at the recently reborn Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. The music seeps from a bathhouse ruin where the hotel stages weekend performances.

On this night it’s a torch song from long ago, sung by an acoustic duo for a small, rapt, eclectic audience — hipsters in their 30s, retirees in their 70s, desert rats and spa seekers, all sitting under the open sky as night falls on the roofless building, a few million surrounding boulders and a long, tall fence that runs into the hills.

These are features that California daydreams are made of, and this emergent scene is luring visitors to an outpost 70 miles southeast of downtown San Diego.

Bar patio area of the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.

(Pia Riverola)

“It’s a refuge from the stressors of the city. Things seem to wash away here,” co-owner Melissa Strukel said recently.

Now, a few more surprises: The town of Jacumba Hot Springs has been down on its luck for decades. That long fence, 2,100 feet south of the hotel, is the Mexican border, where undocumented migrants pass regularly and a crisis flared last year. And the hotel’s owners are new to town and the business.

“Everything is the first time,” Strukel said.

It was four years ago, early in the COVID shutdown, that Strukel, a veteran San Diego designer and special-event rental entrepreneur, decided to take a drive.

She wound up in a town she’d never noticed before, standing outside a bedraggled old motel, smitten.

Siren Suite 11at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.

So smitten, in fact, that she climbed over a wall to get a better look.

“I just knew right away that I belonged here,” Strukel said.

Soon she learned that the motel was for sale — with a catch. The owner wanted to sell it in a 150-acre package deal with most of the commercial property in town: a gas station (without gas), several homes and storefronts, a ruined bathhouse and a littered mess that was once a man-made lake.

Undeterred, Strukel enlisted her business partner Corbin Winters and they formed a plan.

They would recruit their friend Jeff Osborne, a former client and real estate business veteran. They would make the 24-room motel and restaurant into a resort with 18 rooms, two suites, restaurant, bar and global desert vibe, drawing on influences from Mexico to Marfa to Morocco.

They would replumb the hot springs to take advantage of the alkaline water’s “silky texture,” refill the lake, recruit a veteran general manager for the hotel and use the houses as vacation rentals, including two with their own soaking tubs.

Jacumba Lake is a recently revived reservoir fed by the same springs that feed the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.

They would build a new sense of community in Jacumba Hot Springs, where the population is 540, the median age around 62, and the median income and property values are some of the lowest in the county. The nearest full-fledged grocery store is 45 minutes away; the nearest public school, several miles down the road; the nearest legal border crossing, an hour away in Tecate.

“At first I was like, ‘ah, no way,’” Osborne recalled.

But Osborne, 38, whose experience includes several years of house-flipping and short-term rental management, thought on it some more. He drove into town, spent a night in a tent by the lake and changed his mind.

By October 2020 a deal was done. Doing business as We Are Human Kind Inc., the trio paid more than $1.6 million — but less than $3.9 million, Osborne said, declining to be more specific.

Unlike many hotel owners, all three moved to town, taking on major roles in a community short on resources and long on characters.

“This community was the end of the line for a long time,” said Sam Schultz, 69, who lives east of town at the Desert View Tower with eight dogs and at least 12 cats.

Desert View Tower was built as a tourist attraction in the 1920s.

On any day, migrants might be illegally crossing the border nearby, breaching a fence that starts, stops and varies in height, a product of shifting politics and stony slopes.

Yet most of the time, border-crossers are quickly met and taken away by the Border Patrol agents who steadily cruise the dirt roads and highway.

“I haven’t seen one person [crossing] for a couple of weeks now,” said Osborne, who lives in a stone house on a knoll known as Snob Hill. “I live less than a thousand feet from the border … and I don’t lock my doors.”

During my two days in town, I didn’t see anyone crossing, either. But I met plenty of the neighbors.

In the Exotic Desert Hideaway — a.k.a. the hotel bar — you might bump into Roman Wrosz, a 68-year-old inventor and longtime local who flies gliders at the otherwise lonely Jacumba airport.

Along the highway east of town, you will probably encounter Coyote, a 67-year-old junkyard proprietor with a booming baritone voice and a truck that says “UFO retrieval and repairs.”

Exotic Desert Hideaway bar at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.

The Jacumba Hot Springs hotel includes a dark bar decorated with paintings of nudes.

If you see a bearded man in a wheelchair working the register at Sunday breakfast in the town’s community center, that’s probably Eldon Caldwell, 75, who lives in one of the little houses the newcomers purchased.

“They inherited me as tenant,” Caldwell said. “They haven’t raised my rent. They put a shower in for me.”

While Caldwell works the register at those Sunday community center breakfasts, Winters volunteers every other week as a server — again, not standard hotelier behavior. Osborne has signed on as the center’s board president.

“It’s magnificent, what they’ve done,” said Kirk Gilliam, a 69-year-old artist/electrician who builds robot sculptures in a gallery two doors down from the Mountain Sage market on Old Highway 80.

If the new hotel team has its way, more neighbors will arrive soon to fill open hotel jobs and take over storefront vacancies.

“This is not a flip,” said Strukel.

Bathroom scene at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. (Mikael Kennedy; Pia Riverola)

It is, however, one of biggest changes in town since 1919. That’s when a San Diego magnate named John Spreckels opened his “impossible railroad,” running tracks through Jacumba on the boulder-filled hill-and-valley path from San Diego to Yuma.

Next came Highway 80 and speculator Bert Vaughn, who built a four-story hotel, bathhouse and a desert view tower to lure San Diego-Arizona drivers off the road. By the 1950s, a motel and man-made lake had been added.

At the town’s peak, Osborne said, “they say there were 5,000 people here on the weekends.”

But the rail line fell idle. Interstate 8 (two miles north of town) stole most of the passing traffic in the 1970s. The bathhouse and four-story hotel burned.

For a while it seemed the town’s saviors might be a pair of nudists: In the 1990s, David and Helen Landman bought an RV park outside town, converted it into a clothing-optional resort and moved in. Then in 2012, the Landmans bought and made improvements on most of downtown. But as the pandemic began, the couple’s patience ran out. They sold the hotel and most of downtown to Strukel, Winters and Osborne, then peddled the clothing-optional resort, DeAnza Springs, to other buyers in early 2021.

By early last year, the team was deep into redesign and reconstruction, and it was clear that making over the hotel and downtown Jacumba Hot Springs would cost more than buying them did.

The Solstice Pool at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.

To bring back the lake, the three hired workers to spend months scraping with a tractor, consulted with the nonprofit group Indigenous Regeneration, then added about 70 California-native palm trees, which line a sandy shore.

Then the world intervened. In the space of a few spring days, hundreds of immigrants surged over and around the border fence.

Most had come from far beyond Mexico, speaking Chinese, Portuguese and other languages, apparently drawn by the expiration of Title 42, a pandemic-era public health measure that allowed authorities to turn away asylum-seekers more easily. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman said the migrants had been “callously placed [in the area] by for-profit smuggling organizations.”

Once across, the migrants gathered in three encampments and built campfires in the hills south of Old Highway 80, eager to be seen and considered for asylum, most of them without food, water or protection from the elements.

“It was two weeks of bad,” Strukel said.

While the Border Patrol decided how to respond, Jacumba locals spread the news. The hotel team set up a collection site and began to gather and distribute supplies with help from Border Kindness, a Mexicali-based nonprofit, and other groups.

“There were locals who brought out food and supplies, and there were others who hated them for that,” said Gilliam.

The co-owners of the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel.

The hoteliers “weren’t even open and they were using the kitchen as a place for people to bring supplies,” said Kelly Overton, executive director of Border Kindness. “There was no foreseeable benefit to them. They chose to do what they thought was the right thing. … Not everybody makes that decision when it comes to their business and their money.”

As the flow continued into 2024, the Border Patrol imposed more order and sent more buses. Then Mexico boosted its immigration law enforcement near the border and the Biden administration tightened asylum restrictions. Now, Border Patrol officials and locals agree that numbers are down again.

At the hotel, Strukel, Winters and Osborne began a gradual opening in late 2023, launching into daily operation in February, inviting newcomers to explore “an unexpected escape on the dusty edge of everything.”

Its workforce has grown to about 75 people, including general manager Natalie Richards from San Diego, chef Leo Ceja from Los Angeles and director of special programming and hospitality Juan Miron, originally from Tijuana.

I arrived on a Friday, ducking into a rustic-chic trailer that houses the front desk.

Beyond the Moroccan entry gate and wind chimes from Arcosanti in Arizona, every guest room features stylish tiling, a turntable and an adventurously curated selection of books and albums. (Mine included two Louis L’Amour paperbacks and albums by country crooner Charley Crockett and Ethiopian sax player Getatchew Mekuriar.)

Most guests so far have come from San Diego County, “a lot of creative professionals,” Osborne said, and “people that like things off the beaten path, that like going down dirt roads.” Rates typically start at $180 on weekdays, $360 on weekends. (The only other lodging option within five miles of town is the rustic DeAnza Springs Resort.)

That afternoon, guests lounged around the Solstice Pool and Ritual Pool (where sometimes movies are screened) or stepped inside to the warmer soaking tub in the Echo Room.

The Exotic Desert Hideaway Bar — as dim as the desert day is bright— features kitschy nudes on the walls, DJs on weekends, $5 beer during happy hour and a $78 cocktail situation known as “The Fortune Teller.” (It comes flaming in a cauldron, includes tequila and serves six.)

Down the block, Kirk Gilliam usually has his gallery open on weekends. Next to the gallery, David Lampley sells vintage clothes at the Impossible Railroad Trading Post and serves as director of auditory and visual experiences for the hotel. (If you’d like to make a mono recording on a 1938 record-cutting machine, he can help with that too.)

Out at the born-again lake, Coyote the junk dealer has contributed three kayaks and a canoe for anyone who feels like paddling. There’s no fishing, but wildlife sightings are common, including a very large cat — a black jaguar? — at water’s edge in early October.

Though the old bathhouse down the street remains in ruins, it’s busy almost every Saturday night. That’s when the hotel team dresses the roofless structure up with bistro lights and candles and invites an eclectic mix of musicians to play under the stars. Besides torch songs, sea shanties, Latino roots and rockabilly tunes have been heard.

The Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel stages weekly candlelight concerts.

“I’ve been coming out here since I was a teenager, and I never told anyone about it,” singer-songerwriter Mary Simich, 31, told me. “I was afraid people would ruin it.”

Now Simich, who lives in Orange County, is trying to buy a house in town.

The border remains a wild card (especially with new presidents in office or coming soon on both sides of the border). But this dusty little town is already in transition.

Strukel, Winters and Osborne say occupancy at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel is now running above 90%. Entrepreneur Max Daily, semi-famous in San Diego for running the pop-up Oslo Sardine Bar, has announced plans to open an eatery on Old Highway 80 with a stage for live music. Possible name: the Jacumba Yacht Club.

Meanwhile at DeAnza Springs — the former clothing-optional resort north of town — new owners Luke Wasyliu and Kevin Cho have made clothing mandatory, upgraded infrastructure and boosted a focus on wellness, glamping and weekend music festivals, including Youtopia, an October gathering aimed at devotees of Burning Man.

“It’s gentrification,” neighbor Sam Schultz said recently, sitting near the entrance of the Desert View Tower. “And a certain amount of gentrification is good for us around here.”

What to do, see and eat in and near Jacumba

Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel, 44500 Old Highway 80, Jacumba Hot Springs; (760) 766-4333. Room rates start at $180 on weekdays, $360 on weekends.

DeAnza Springs Resort, 1951 Carrizo Gorge Road, Jacumba Hot Springs; (619) 766-4301. The campground has 311 RV sites and about two dozen rental travel trailers, tiny homes, tent sites and motel rooms, two pools and a restaurant. Neighbored on three sides by Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, it also has many trails, including the scenic 1.1-mile Temple Peak Loop Trail. Hikers pay $5 each for trail access, a good bargain. Often hosts weekend music festivals.

Desert View Tower, In-Ko-Pah Road, Jacumba; (619) 971-2845. The view from this 70-foot tower is OK. The best part of the property is the neighboring trail among boulders, where someone long ago carved and painted all sort of faces and creatures. Adult admission $9.50.

Pacific Southwest Railway Museum, 750 Depot St., Campo. Open Saturday and Sunday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission $10 for adults. The museum is a place for hard-core train people, unless you’re going on a train ride (about 10.5 miles round-trip). Those are offered on Saturdays at 10:30 a.m., 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m., at varying prices. The museum also has a location in La Mesa.

Gaskill Brothers Stone Store Museum, Forest Gate Road and Historic Highway 94, Campo; (619) 980-2013. Includes a timeline on local history. The upstairs of the stone story museum is mostly about the Buffalo Soldiers. Open Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.

Camp Lockett Event & Equestrian Facility, 799 Forest Gate Rd., Campo; (619) 369-9399. Including a Buffalo Soldier Museum, horse facilities and camping area. The camp, built in 1941 and closed in 1946, was the last base of operations for Black “Buffalo Soldiers” before the U.S. Army integrated and disbanded cavalry units. The Buffalo Soldiers guarded the U.S.’ southern border and Italian prisoners of war. Museum opens Saturday 9 a.m.- 5p.m., closed in December.

Lifestyle

Mundane, magic, maybe both — a new book explores ‘The Writer’s Room’

Published

8 hours ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

Mundane, magic, maybe both — a new book explores ‘The Writer’s Room’

There’s a three-story house in Baltimore that looks a bit imposing. You walk up the stone steps before even getting up to the porch, and then you enter the door and you’re greeted with a glass case of literary awards. It’s The Clifton House, formerly home of Lucille Clifton.

The National Book Award-winning poet lived there with her husband, Fred, starting in 1967 until the bank foreclosed on the house in 1980. Clifton’s daughter, Sidney Clifton, has since revived the house and turned it into a cultural hub, hosting artists, readings, workshops and more. But even during a February visit, in the mid-afternoon with no organized events on, the house feels full.

The corner of Lucille Clifton’s bedroom, where she would wake up and write in the mornings

Andrew Limbong/NPR

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Andrew Limbong/NPR

“There’s a presence here,” Clifton House Executive Director Joël Díaz told me. “There’s a presence here that sits at attention.”

Sometimes, rooms where famous writers worked can be places of ineffable magic. Other times, they can just be rooms.

Princeton University Press

Katie da Cunha Lewin is the author of the new book, The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love, which explores the appeal of these rooms. Lewin is a big Virginia Woolf fan, and the very first place Lewin visited working on the book was Monk’s House — Woolf’s summer home in Sussex, England. On the way there, there were dreams of seeing Woolf’s desk, of retracing Woolf’s steps and imagining what her creative process would feel like. It turned out to be a bit of a disappointment for Lewin — everything interesting was behind glass, she said. Still, in the book Lewin writes about how she took a picture of the room and saved it on her phone, going back to check it and re-check it, “in the hope it would allow me some of its magic.”

Let’s be real, writing is a little boring. Unlike a band on fire in the recording studio, or a painter possessed in their studio, the visual image of a writer sitting at a desk click-clacking away at a keyboard or scribbling on a piece of paper isn’t particularly exciting. And yet, the myth of the writer’s room continues to enrapture us. You can head to Massachusetts to see where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women. Or go down to Florida to visit the home of Zora Neale Hurston. Or book a stay at the Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Alabama, where the famous couple lived for a time. But what, exactly, is the draw?

Previously unknown poems show Woolf as a fun aunt. She's pictured above in 1902.

Lewin said in an interview that whenever she was at a book event or an author reading, an audience question about the writer’s writing space came up. And yes, some of this is basic fan-driven curiosity. But also “it started to occur to me that it was a central mystery about writing, as if writing is a magic thing that just happens rather than actually labor,” she said.

In a lot of ways, the book is a debunking of the myths we’re presented about writers in their rooms. She writes about the types of writers who couldn’t lock themselves in an office for hours on end, and instead had to find moments in-between to work on their art. She covers the writers who make a big show of their rooms, as a way to seem more writerly. She writes about writers who have had their homes and rooms preserved, versus the ones whose rooms have been lost to time and new real estate developments. The central argument of the book is that there is no magic formula to writing — that there is no daily to-do list to follow, no just-right office chair to buy in order to become a writer. You just have to write.

Lifestyle

Bruce Johnston Retiring From The Beach Boys After 61 Years

Published

9 hours ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

Bruce Johnston Retiring From The Beach Boys After 61 Years

Bruce Johnston
I’m Riding My Last Wave With The Beach Boys

Published
March 4, 2026
6:28 PM PST

Bruce Johnston is riding off into the California sunset … at least for now.

The Beach Boys legend announced Wednesday he’s stepping away from touring after six decades with the iconic band. The 83-year-old revealed in a statement to Rolling Stone he’s hanging up his touring hat to focus on what he calls part three of his long music career.

beach boys getty 4

“It’s time for Part Three of my lengthy musical career!” Johnston said. “I can write songs forever, and wait until you hear what’s coming!!! As my major talent beyond singing is songwriting, now is the time to get serious again.”

Johnston famously stepped in for co-founder Brian Wilson in 1965 for live performances, becoming a staple of the Beach Boys’ touring lineup ever since. Now, he says he’s shifting gears toward songwriting and even some speaking engagements … with occasional touring member John Stamos helping him craft what he’ll talk about onstage.

beach boys getty

“I might even sing ‘Disney Girls’ & ‘I Write The Songs!!’” he teased.

But don’t call it a full-on farewell tour just yet. Johnston made it clear he’s not shutting the door completely, saying he’s excited to reunite with the band for special occasions, including their upcoming July 2-4 shows at the Hollywood Bowl as part of the Beach Boys’ 2026 tour. The run celebrates both the 60th anniversary of “Pet Sounds” and America’s 250th birthday.

beach boys getty 3

“This isn’t goodbye, it’s see you soon,” he wrote. “I am forever grateful to be a part of the Beach Boys musical legacy.”

Lifestyle

On the brink of death, a woman is saved by a stranger and his family

Published

20 hours ago

March 4, 2026

Press Room

On the brink of death, a woman is saved by a stranger and his family

In 1982, Jean Muenchrath was injured in a mountaineering accident and on the brink of death when a stranger and his family went out of their way to save her life.

Jean Muenchrath

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Jean Muenchrath

In early May 1982, Jean Muenchrath and her boyfriend set out on a mountaineering trip in the Sierra Nevada, a mountain range in California. They had done many backcountry trips in the area before, so the terrain was somewhat familiar to both of them. But after they reached one of the summits, a violent storm swept in. It began to snow heavily, and soon the pair was engulfed in a blizzard, with thunder and lightning reverberating around them.

“Getting struck and killed by lightning was a real possibility since we were the highest thing around for miles and lightning was striking all around us,” Muenchrath said.

To reach safer ground, they decided to abandon their plan of taking a trail back. Instead, using their ice axes, they climbed down the face of the mountain through steep and icy snow chutes.

They were both skilled at this type of descent, but at one particularly difficult part of the route, Muenchrath slipped and tumbled over 100 feet down the rocky mountain face. She barely survived the fall and suffered life-threatening injuries.

When Olivia Joffrey's dad was too sick to attend her sixth-grade Father's Day softball game, her unsung hero, Bob Scowcroft, showed up to support her.

This was before cellular or satellite phones, so calling for help wasn’t an option. The couple was forced to hike through deep snow back to the trailhead. Once they arrived, Muenchrath collapsed in the parking lot. It had been five days since she’d fallen.

”My clothes were bloody. I had multiple fractures in my spine and pelvis, a head injury and gangrene from a deep wound,” Muenchrath said.

Not long after they reached the trailhead parking lot, a car pulled in. A man was driving, with his wife in the passenger seat and their baby in the back. As soon as the man saw Muenchrath’s condition, he ran over to help.

”He gently stroked my head, and he held my face [and] reassured me by saying something like, ‘You’re going to be OK now. I’ll be right back to get you,’” Muenchrath remembered.

For the first time in days, her panic began to lift.

“My unsung hero gave me hope that I’d reach a hospital and I’d survive. He took away my fears.”

Within a few minutes, the man had unpacked his car. His wife agreed to stay back in the parking lot with their baby in order to make room for Muenchrath, her boyfriend and their backpacks.

The man drove them to a nearby town so that the couple could get medical treatment.

“I remember looking into the eyes of my unsung hero as he carried me into the emergency room in Lone Pine, California. I was so weak, I couldn’t find the words to express the gratitude I felt in my heart.”

Joann Moschella had just been hit by a car when an unlikely hero came to her rescue.

The gratitude she felt that day only grew. Now, nearly 45 years later, she still thinks about the man and his family.

”He gave me the gift of allowing me to live my life and my dreams,” Muenchrath said.

At some point along the way, the man gave Muenchrath his contact information. But in the chaos of the day, she lost it and has never been able to find him.

”If I knew where my unsung hero was today, I would fly across the country to meet him again. I’d hug him, buy him a meal and tell him how much he continues to mean to me by saving my life. Wherever you are, I say thank you from the depths of my being.”

My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.