Ten Thousand Waves

The road out of town toward the ski basin climbs fast. Four miles up Hyde Park Road, in the piñon and ponderosa on the west flank of the Sangre de Cristos, there is a Japanese bathhouse, and it has been there since 1981. Ten Thousand Waves is not a hot spring. The water is heated, which people are occasionally disappointed to learn and should not be. The model here is the onsen and the ryokan, not the geology.

How It Grew

Duke Klauck opened it after years of finding his way to natural hot springs, and it began as almost nothing: a small bathhouse, eight outdoor tubs, and one massage room cut into a hillside. It has grown by accretion ever since, one structure at a time, which is why it reads as a village of small wooden buildings stacked up a slope rather than a resort with a lobby at the bottom of it. Their own name for the look is Japanese-adobe, and the phrase is more accurate than it sounds. The two vocabularies share a preference for mass, for low light, and for unfussy wood, and the meeting is less strange here than it would be almost anywhere else. Anyone who has spent time with the way adobe works will recognize what is happening on that hillside.

The Baths

Most of the bathing is done in private suites, each self-contained, with its own tub, sauna, changing area, and shower. Several are open to the sky. Several have cold plunges, and the sequence of hot water, then cold water, then cold air is the entire argument for coming in January rather than July. The tubs carry names: Ofuro, Ichiban, Shoji, Waterfall, Kojiro. Communal soaking is now a reserved arrangement for a group rather than the drop-in tubs of the early years, which is worth knowing if you were last here in 1998.

Massage and body work run through a long list of traditions, alongside facials and other treatments. You wear a yukata between one thing and the next. Phones are discouraged in the bathing areas, and the discouragement is taken seriously. Reserve well ahead for weekends, holidays, and anything in high summer.

Izanami and Houses of the Moon

Izanami opened on the property in November 2013 as an izakaya, small plates built to be eaten with sake, and within months it was a James Beard semifinalist for Best New Restaurant. It is open to people who have not booked a tub, which makes it one of the few destination restaurants in Santa Fe that asks you to drive up a mountain and is worth the drive anyway. The sake list is the serious part.

Houses of the Moon is the inn: sixteen rooms and suites scattered through the trees on the hillside, Japanese in plan and in detail. Staying overnight changes the thing entirely. The baths early, with nobody else awake, are a different proposition from the baths on a Saturday evening.

Going

Hyde Park Road is steep, and from roughly November through March it ices. Give yourself more time than the distance suggests, and in winter give some thought to what is on your tires. It is about fifteen minutes from the Plaza, which in a town where most things are five minutes away registers as a journey, and the journey is part of what you are paying attention to.

The best version of this is not a spa day. It is a day spent elsewhere, an afternoon on Canyon Road or at SITE Santa Fe or the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and then the drive up at dusk with snow on the fence rails and steam coming off the water. The Santa Fe year has a shape, and this is one of the few places in it where winter is plainly better than summer.

Common Questions

Is Ten Thousand Waves a natural hot spring?

No. It is a Japanese-style bathhouse with heated water, four miles up Hyde Park Road from downtown Santa Fe. It opened in 1981.

Do you have to stay overnight to use the baths?

No. The baths, the spa, and Izanami are all open to visitors who are not staying at Houses of the Moon. Reservations are advised, particularly on weekends and holidays.