Drink from a spring that's been bubbling since before the Civil War

Cup your hands under the Geyser Island Spouter and you’re drinking water that started its trip up through the earth before the Civil War, pushed to the surface by pockets of carbonic gas trapped under deep shale along the Saratoga Fault. The Spouter throws a narrow plume ten to fifteen feet into the air, and over the decades its minerals have hardened into a pale, lumpy mound of tufa rock that grows about two inches a year. It’s been doing this since the early 1900s. The mound is basically the spring keeping a slow, stony diary.

Long before the resort era, Mohawk people hunted this land and treated the bubbling water as sacred. By 1880, less reverent hands had drilled over 200 wells here, pumping out carbonic gas to fizz the fountain sodas of the day until the springs nearly ran dry. New York stepped in with anti-pumping laws in 1908. Then Franklin Roosevelt, governor in 1929, pushed to build the grand “New Spa,” and it opened on a Friday, July 26th, 1935.

Here’s the fun part: every spring tastes different. Wander the trails and you can sample them like a flight. Hathorn #3 is the park’s saltiest and most mineral-heavy. Orenda runs high in salt and potassium iodide and has built its own tufa dome that quietly fossilizes fallen leaves. Hayes is salty and tastes a lot like the Spouter. State Seal and Ferndell are fresh and flat, no fizz at all. By the spring called Karista, folks once dug mud to treat their aching joints.

Bring a small cup. Some of it tastes like the earth cleared its throat. That’s how you know it’s real.