To live like a Cowboy by Steffi Kammerer | 28th November, 2024 | Destinations

The story began in Telluride, Colorado, on a rainy January morning in 1994. Christoph Henkel had cracked a rib on a mogul course the previous day and was taking a break from the slopes. He and his then business partner decided to drive out to a hot spring deep in the mountains, about two hours away, which someone had mentioned was for sale. “When we arrived, we almost fell over,” Henkel recalls. The hot springs were not hot, the ground was covered knee-deep in marmot scat and the log cabins surrounding the site had partly collapsed, their doors swinging in the wind, their windows cracked from bullet holes. “We fell in love with the place immediately. After only fifteen minutes, we said: We have to buy it, we’ll think of what to do with it afterwards.”

Today, 30 years later, Dunton Hot Springs is a member of the exclusive hotel and ­restaurant association Relais & Châteaux. But on the half-hour drive up into the mountains along a dusty track, the turns growing tighter and tighter the higher you go and the rear windshield covered in red grit, you begin to realize that staying at this resort will be unlike what you might expect at other five-star hotels. Guests spend the night in 14 lovingly furnished wooden cabins, some of them as big as a full-sized chalet, surrounded by 75 hectares of land bordering on national forest.

Dunton Hot Springs is also an adventure, a journey back in time to an era characterized by upheaval, by danger and deprivation. The cabins attest to the hardships people underwent in search of a better life, dragging the logs with which to build them behind horses, along rough forest paths through the mountains. These same log cabins are now finely furnished and equipped with every comfort, but you can still sense the excitement of that legendary period as you luxuriate beneath the ­rainforest shower and relax in front of a blazing fire. Appointments, stress, all your worries are just distant memories. During the day, you watch eagles circling high above, at night, you look up at incredibly bright stars.

In the 1880s, gold and copper were mined in the isolated town of Dunton, where only about 500 people lived. Almost four decades later, the miners and their families abandoned the town to follow the railway. The huge area became part of a cattle ranch, was occupied by hippies in the 1970s, purchased by a former Wall Street executive and then finally by the German entrepreneur Christof Henkel, who grew up in Düsseldorf with Karl May (the author of extremely popular adventure stories of the Old West). On special evenings, Henkel himself stands behind the bar in the restored saloon.

Dunton Hot Springs is a declaration of love to the Wild West. Many of the details are authentic, but the resort was never intended to be a museum. Some of the buildings originated elsewhere, Henkel had them taken down several hundred miles away and hauled to the property by truck, where he grouped them in such a way that everything is easily accessible by foot. Each piece of timber was numbered and then reassembled like a 3D puzzle. It took seven years to turn the old mining camp into a resort, he says. “The only thing that was already there when we arrived was power. No water, definitely no sewage system and no telephone.” About a year after he bought the property, he met Katrin Bellinger, an art expert from Cologne. They had only just fallen in love when he took her with him to Dunton, where they used a pail to fetch water from the spring and had no facilities apart from an outhouse. He asked her to marry him in a meadow in the mountains. They soon had two sons and moved to London. But to this day, they spend summers and Christmases in Colorado.

The family’s private home stands somewhat apart, a five-story tower made of wood and glass that vanishes into the treetops. Designed by Annabelle Selldorf, it’s a good enough reason in itself for architecture fans to make the trip to Dunton Hot Springs. The world-famous architect is a close friend of the Henkels’, she went to school with Katrin in Cologne. Every August, the Henkels and their grown sons host a barbecue at the resort, tables groaning beneath mountains of steak. It’s attended by ranchers from the adjacent valley and long-time friends from Europe, as well as an Oscar-winner with her children and a famous singer. Neither of them have bodyguards present, nor are they at all worried that anyone will bother them. The actor, to reveal just a little bit, says that Dunton is one of her absolute favorite places, that she comes here regularly but keeps it to herself.

After purchasing quite a bit more land about four miles downriver in 2007, Henkel opened the Dunton River Camp: eight luxurious tents that can be occupied between June and mid-October. Kim Kardashian booked the entire camp in an attempt to save her marriage with Kanye West. She never posted any details of that stay on social media, but in one photo, the Gmundner tableware, which they use at Dunton, was clearly visible. A short time later, a crate arrived from Austria with personalized tableware for every member of the Henkel family and a card saying: “Thank you for the extra business.” Christoph Henkel shakes his head and laughs, as he so often does when speaking about Dunton. “I’m actually a rational person, but perhaps it was all in the stars,” he says. “When you think about your life looking forward, it appears as a straight line, but when you look back, you see that it’s like a bowl of spaghetti. Dunton was one of these big twists that didn’t fit at all, but I was crazy enough and had the bandwidth to do it. You have to be a bit stubborn to carry something like that through to the end.”