Dripping Springs and Boyd’s Sanitorium

Tucked in the Organs above Las Cruces, hides my favorite hike in the whole world – the historical and beautiful Dripping Springs! Dripping Springs offers an incredibly beautiful hike that takes you back to the Nineteenth Century. It also passes by the remjasmineains of Boyd’s Sanitorium, named one of the most haunted places in New Mexico.

I have done this hike many times. The last time, the wind was blowing against us, so the gentle 3-mile hike became an incredible workout. It really isn’t a hard hike, though. It is a really well-maintained trail with a few shade trees and some benches to sit down along the way. It costs $5 to explore the area and its many trails, but if you have a national park pass, you can use that. The area is considered part of the Organ Mountains National Monument. 

First, you can visit the old Cox ranch house and learn about the area. Then you hike up a gentle ascent past many interesting land features and yucca and cactus. Soon, you reach the old livery stable for the stagecoach that brought guests into the Van Patten Mountain Camp. There is also an old chicken coop here, where meat and eggs for the Mountain Camp were produced. The buildings are remarkably well-preserved and grating keeps people from entering them and vandalizing them. 

Beyond that, you enter a canyon with lots of trees and a rocky creekbed that is usually dry. This is where you will reach a fork in the trail. Take the left fork and you will get to the abandoned resort, Van Patten’s Mountain Camp; the right leads to Boyd’s Sanitorium. The trail does form a loop so you can visit both places either way you take.

Van Patten’s Mountain Camp was one of the swankiest hotels in the Southwest in the 1870s. Built of local quarried rock and mud plaster, it featured a gazebo with a bandstand, a dance hall, a dining hall, and sixteen guest rooms. The walls were covered in gorgeous patterned paper and muslin was stretched across the ceilings. People used to take the stagecoach 17 miles up the mountains to escape the blistering heat of El Paso and Las Cruces below. The resort produced almost all its own food.

Now the mountain camp is just a skeleton of stone walls with patches of yellow plaster clinging on, huge window frames looking in on grassy floors, and steps leading to nowhere. The most gorgeous, fragrant Spanish broom spills over cracked steps leading to one of the best-preserved parts of the resort. I wonder if it was planted there way back when?

I always look at the lingering window frames and imagine posh ladies and gentlemen in cowboy hats, enjoying mint juleps and conversation.  I can only imagine what the stars must have looked like back then with no light pollution, as people danced around the gazebo on torrid summer nights.  On especially still days, you can close your eyes and hear vague snippets of laughter. Maybe they’re just hikers hidden in the trees, but I like to think they’re the ghosts of Nineteenth Century guests, lingering where they have many happy memories. Hopefully these ghosts still see it in its former glory.

The hotel was founded by Eugene van Patten, a soldier and Rough Rider who helped steal much of the land in the Southwest from the Apaches. While now he would be considered a racist, colonialist scumbag, back then he was a hero. He eventually settled in Las Cruces with a Piro Native American wife whose family settled Tortugas, NM. He amassed land in the Organs, upon which he established his Mountain Camp in the 1870s. 

He eventually leased some of his land to Dr. Nathan Boyd from Illinois. Dr. Boyd founded Boyd’s Sanitorium, a tuberculosis asylum that he created for his wife, built adjacent to the Mountain Camp. Many people stayed here to recover in the lovingly arid climate of the organs. While much suffering and death happened here, I also like to think that much healing happened.  I can imagine TB patients sitting next to the dripping springs and taking in the views of the valley below and the mountains above.

What now remains of the sanitorium are the old community buildings. The patients lived in lean-tos that have long since returned to the earth. The buildings were in remarkably good shape until 1946 or so, when vandals and partiers started to destroy them. That’s why they are now barricaded and grated to keep people out.

I didn’t get a great photo of the community building, so I really recommend you check out this one on Bryan Berg’s blog.

The place has always felt peaceful and lovely to me. A lot of people don’t agree, however. The asylum’s creepy reputation commenced when nearby campers started being tortured by nightmares of being operated on. Campers also reportedly saw shadow people in the area. There are rumors that the doctors at Boyd’s Sanitorium would experiment on patients and throw patients out to wander and die in the mountains if someone richer wanted their bed.

Good thing the park closes at sunset, because supposedly nighttime is when people experience sighs, shadow figures, raspy sighs, and feelings of dread or sadness. I have never stayed at night so I can’t tell you about any firsthand experiences with that.

But I can tell you that the night after I first visited Boyd’s, I had my first episode of sleep paralysis. I woke up feeling like someone was sitting atop me, choking me and crushing my chest. I was terrified. I tried to move but was completely paralyzed. The window was open since it was a warm May night, and I swore that I felt evil blowing in through it. I really, really focused on moving my hand to touch my boyfriend, and somehow I eventually was able to touch his back, which snapped me out of the episode. I shook my boyfriend awake and he held me as I trembled. 

Related to Boyd’s? I can’t say. But I have come back several times since with no issues. It is a beautiful, peaceful place where you can sit in quiet contemplation, interrupted only by the birdsong, the trickle of the springs, and the voices of the occasional hiker. The area gets a lot of traffic, but you can still enjoy solitude here in my experience. 

The area is called “Dripping Springs” because of a little spring gurgling out of the mountain. The times I have gone, it is a little trickle from the heart of the Organs. But I have seen videos of it really gushing after significant snowmelt or a healthy monsoon season. It gets serious enough that they have built a containment wall around it. The spring spills into a creekbed that looks pretty big and dramatic. 

Eugene van Patten’s time here did end in tragedy. Dr. Boyd proved to be quite the shyster. Not only did he want to capitalize on TB with the asylum, but he also had a scheme to dam the Rio Grande and extort farmers downstream for water rights. Fortunately the dam project fell apart, so he turned his focus to extorting Van Patten. He stopped paying his lease and the two got into a feud. Legal fees drove van Patten bankrupt. He eventually sold the land to Dr. Boyd for a dollar and died a year after that. 

While he is buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Las Cruces, I like to think that his spirit still walks here, remembering when this place was his. I hope that he is vindicated by the fact that Dr. Boyd also lost the land in 1922, when vaccines and efficient TB treatments ended the demand for climate-based TB asylums. Dr. Boyd sold it to Dr. Troy Curtis Sexton, who operated it only a few years before closing it for good. 

I read somewhere that Dr. Sexton was actually the one responsible for the creepy happenings here. It is said he was unethical and did horrible things to his patients, including torturing them. But I have not found any verifiable sources regarding this. Dr. Sexton died in 1939 and is buried in the Las Cruces Masonic Cemetery.

Dr. Sexton sold the area to a rancher named AB Cox. The Dripping Springs Visitor’s Center is the old Cox ranch house, built by the Hayner Family, and the nearby buildings are old outhouses and barns. You can still see water tanks that Cox used for his cattle in a few places in the recreation area. The BLM acquired the land at some point, and then it became part of the Organ Mountains National Monument. 

Thus, it has, once again, become a beloved place where people go to escape the Mesilla Valley’s heat. Between incredible views and desert flora and fauna, this is a truly underrated hike. 

La Cueva and Fillmore Falls are also part of the Dripping Springs recreation area. I shall write about them in later posts. You can also use the Fillmore Falls trail to get to the Organ Needle, a hard hike that I aspire to someday soon.

https://www.hiddennewmexico.com/blog/dripping-springs

https://www.creepyhollows.com/boyd.html