![]() ![]() Already, traffic on the road running past Castle Hot Springs has increased, compromising the isolation that was always the key to its charm. The Maricopa County Recreation Services Department expected a million people at Lake Pleasant this year, but that seems to have been a conservative estimate. A new boat ramp, new roads, an improved marina and a second marina in the works-there are even plans for a lakeside hotel-have meant a jump in the number of visitors to the regional park. The completion of the new Waddell Dam has enlarged what had been a small body of water to a 10,000-acre lake with a 125-mile shoreline. ![]() But Castle Hot Springs, neglected all these years, has suddenly become an attractive investment, largely because of its proximity to Lake Pleasant, a scant dozen miles away. The hotel has been unoccupied for more than a decade, and its interiors have been left to bugs and bats and cluttered with junk. ![]() Located 50 or so miles northwest of Phoenix in the flood plain of Castle Creek, the resort's cluster of turn-of-the-century buildings and hundreds of swaying palm trees look like a mirage in the desert to the unprepared traveler. Opened in 1896, Castle Hot Springs was the first resort in the state of Arizona and one of the most beloved. "It was just like living in an Eden of some kind," Ena says. She and her husband were the caretakers during the summer, when the resort's isolation allowed them to skinny dip in the famous pools, and to walk around, literally, as naked as Adam and Eve. Starting in 1936, Ena had worked at Castle Hot Springs, first as a postmistress and then in the gift shop, and later as a waitress. When I went over that hill, I thought, 'I don't know if I want to see this or not.'" "I had to go there the next day with the mail. "I just could hardly bear to go out there," she says. Ena McGuire delivered the mail up and down the road the hotel was located on. The fire took place in December 1976, only days before the resort was to open for the season.
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