Conundrum Hot Springs Guide

There’s no road to Conundrum. The clothing-optional soaking pools sit at roughly 11,200 feet in the Maroon Bells–Snowmass Wilderness, and the only way in is the Conundrum Creek Trail #1981 — 8.5 miles each way, a 17-mile round trip that gains thousands of feet and stays snowbound into June. The reward is a string of hand-built rock pools of natural hot water perched on a bench with fourteeners standing over you and, after dark, a sky with nothing between it and you. This is a backpacking trip, not a soak-and-drive: you sleep up there, at one of exactly 20 designated campsites, and you carry everything back out. The altitude and the mileage are the filter — plenty of people underestimate both.