About this series
During 2006, the Missoulian is traveling six two-lane highways in Montana, writing about and photographing the people and places of the state we call home. U.S. Highway 93 is the fifth to be traveled. This is the first of four parts about that trip.
HAMILTON - In a box canyon southeast of here, the water bubbles up from deep inside the earth at the rate of 200 gallons per minute, and at a temperature - 130 degrees - too hot for humans.
This is Sleeping Child Hot Springs, the one-time public resort turned private residence.
You can be its next owner.
The hot water comes with a five-story, 25,000-square-foot home with a dozen bedrooms and 18 bathrooms, a seven-car garage, five guest cabins and one heliport set on 40 acres inside the Bitterroot National Forest.
Yes, of course, it has a swimming pool. The water has cooled to 102 degrees by the time it enters the outdoor pool, and set above it are two hot tubs, too. Only the hardiest can dip a toe in the 125-degree temperature of one, while the other is 108 degrees.
Tucked deep in the forest, seven miles from its nearest neighbors, Sleeping Child was a favorite getaway for many western Montanans before it went private. Guests stayed in an A-frame hotel and the place had a mom-and-pop, home-built feel to it.
But the construction of the five condo-like “cabins” against the back wall of the canyon's cliffs signaled the beginning of the end for Sleeping Child's days as a public retreat, though it evidently wasn't planned that way. Owner Ed Chopot closed the resort to dismantle the old A-frame and put up the five-story structure next to the pool, apparently with designs on making it a luxury hotel/casino.
The building was finished but the plans never panned out, and Sleeping Child has been a private retreat ever since.
Its current owner, an investor who lives in Whitefish, has it on the market. Casey Robinson of Coldwell Banker Wachholz & Co. in Missoula has the listing.
The asking price is $18 million.
Aron Mielke and Becci Pfantz are anxious to know who will be Sleeping Child's next owners, and what their plans will be.
They're heading into their fourth winter as Sleeping Child's caretakers.
“If there be paradise this is - this is” reads a sign near the pool, and Mielke and Pfantz wouldn't argue.
“We never take it for granted,” Mielke says. “Not for one minute.”
The Wisconsin transplants live in one of the guest cabins full time, along with Pfantz's daughter Karissa.
Landscapers by trade, they came to the Bitterroot Valley in 2000, as “millennium pioneers,” Mielke says.
Two years later his cousin, who worked for the lawyer who owned Sleeping Child at the time, told him the caretaker's job was open.
Mielke and Pfantz jumped at the chance, and they've grown to love their mostly isolated existence in the box canyon they share with bighorn sheep, elk, mule deer and bears.
“We treat the place as if it was our own,” Pfantz says, “but we don't entertain as if it was.”
With the place on the market, Mielke and Pfantz know Sleeping Child's future is wide open. It could become someone's permanent home, could even be returned to commercial use.
They think it would be perfect for someone in the music business, who could turn one of the floors into a recording studio and still have plenty of room to roam.
Whatever happens, they hope they'll be kept on.
“We're kind of settled,” Mielke admits. “We've got a lot of knowledge about the place we gained through the years, and we know the system. To throw somebody else into it might be kind of tough.”
There are complete houses within the main house - apartments might be a more appropriate term, but would hardly do the fancy digs (there's a fountain in the living room of one, for instance) justice.
We tour the home, floor by floor.
There's more than half an acre of living space, leading Pfantz to announce, “I wish someone would invent the riding vacuum cleaner.”
The fourth floor was designed to serve as Chopot's living quarters. The fifth floor is a solarium.
The whole thing is heated by the hot water that bubbles up from the ground, and Pfantz says it's so abundant, efficient and - once you've plunked down $18 million, anyway - free, that you can leave the doors open to collect the fresh air of winter and still stay toasty warm.
Mielke says MTV offered the present owner $60,000 a month rent to film its reality series “Real World” at Sleeping Child.
He turned them down.
Gen. Oliver Otis Howard pursued the Nez Perce Indians into this valley, and when the soldiers got too close and a battle appeared imminent, the Indians left their infants by the hot springs.
The Army passed, never noticing the children sleeping peacefully nearby.
It's been Sleeping Child Hot Springs since, and Mielke says: “We tread lightly. I mean, Chief Joseph used to soak his bones here.”
Chopot, the former owner, fled the country in 2003. The self-made millionaire from Spokane was $12 million in debt to Las Vegas casinos at the time, including $3.5 million at the MGM Grand Hotel.
He was murdered in Escazu, Costa Rica, last year.
The current owners “have been a fabulous family to work for,” Mielke says. They're sorry to see them sell.
But for now, they vacuum and dust and rake leaves and change out pumps and clean the pool and hot tubs and hope that when the next chapter in the Sleeping Child story unfolds, they'll be a part of it.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at (406) 319-2117 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.
Photographer Linda Thompson can be reached at (406) 523-5270 or at linda.thompson@lee.net.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)