How Calistoga earned the score

Let’s Meet Calistoga, California

Highway 29 runs out of pretension about two miles before it runs into Mount Saint Helena. The tasting room traffic thins, the valley pinches to a point, and the last town before the road starts climbing smells, on the right morning, faintly of sulfur. Steam drifts off pools behind garden fences. A geyser goes off on its own schedule at the edge of town. This is Calistoga, population 5,228 (US Census 2020), the corner of Napa Valley where the ground itself is the attraction.

Nearly everything a visitor needs sits on or within a short walk of Lincoln Avenue: the old rail depot, the Sharpsteen Museum, tasting rooms, restaurants, and the spa marquees that have been the town’s storefront promise for more than a century and a half. The city’s lodging ledger counts roughly 690 rooms across 42 licensed properties, per its lodging tax reporting, which is a remarkable number of beds for a few blocks of downtown. People do not stop in Calistoga on the way to something else. The highway dead ends into the mountain. You come here on purpose.

And the purpose, for most of the town’s existence, has not changed: hot mineral water out of the ground, volcanic ash off the mountain, and someone willing to draw you a bath in both. Wine made this valley world famous. Wellness made this town, and the town has now built that same product at least three times, roughly a lifetime apart each time.

The Toast That Named the Town

Samuel Brannan arrived rich, which in gold rush California usually foreshadows the rest of the story. A Mormon elder turned merchant and newspaperman, Brannan is commonly called California’s first millionaire; he made his fortune selling shovels and supplies to the forty niners rather than digging himself. Starting in 1859 he bought more than 2,000 acres around the upper valley’s hot springs with a specific model in mind: Saratoga Springs, New York, the fashionable East Coast spa resort of the day (Wikipedia; Visit Calistoga).

The resort opened in 1862, and it was not subtle. The town’s official history describes a large hot springs bathhouse, small bathing pavilions, landscaped grounds, a hotel and dining room, a roller skating rink, an observatory for viewing the valley, a druidical temple built of petrified wood hauled in from the fossil forest nearby, and a tree lined racetrack with stables where Leland Stanford, James Lick, Mark Hopkins, and George Hearst kept horses (Visit Calistoga). The name is the best part of the legend. At a banquet, Brannan rose to toast his project as the Saratoga of California and, several glasses deep, produced the Calistoga of Sarafornia instead. Brannan himself put the coinage down to a slip of the tongue. The town kept it.

The Napa Valley Railroad reached town in 1868 and made the springs a terminus: San Francisco to the baths in a day (Wikipedia). Brannan’s fortune did not survive the decade’s reversals, and the grand resort faded with its founder. The town it had assembled did not fade. Calistoga incorporated on January 6, 1886, and settled into the long business of being the place where the valley goes to soak.

Wellness, Built a Second Time

The springs carried the town through the decades the resort could not. In May 1880 a newly married, chronically ill Robert Louis Stevenson arrived on his honeymoon; the Hot Springs Hotel’s rates were more than the couple could manage, so he and Fanny squatted in an abandoned bunkhouse at the derelict Silverado mine on Mount Saint Helena. The travel memoir he wrote about that summer, The Silverado Squatters (1883), fixed the upper valley in literature, and the state park on the mountain now carries his name (Robert Louis Stevenson Museum; Visit Calistoga).

The wellness infrastructure kept compounding in small, durable increments. In 1913, on the ground where Brannan’s original plunge stood, Indian Springs poured an Olympic sized mineral pool, one of the largest in California, fed by four thermal geysers on the property; the resort bills itself as the state’s oldest continuously operating pool and spa facility, and the 1913 pool is still the center of it (Indian Springs Calistoga). In 1920 a soda fountain owner named Giuseppe Musante struck hot mineral water while drilling on his lot; by 1924 he was bottling Calistoga Sparkling Mineral Water, and the town’s name began traveling on labels far beyond the valley (Wikipedia).

Then came the second founding. In 1952 a chiropractor named John Wilkinson, Doc to the whole town, opened a modest spa motel with his wife Edy and packaged Calistoga’s geology into a sequence he called The Works: a soak in hot volcanic ash mud blended with peat, a mineral water whirlpool, a steam room, a blanket wrap, and a massage, about ninety minutes end to end (Dr. Wilkinson’s). It was wellness at motel prices, mud democratized. Dr. Wilkinson’s Backyard Resort and Mineral Springs still operates under his name more than seventy years later, and The Works is still on the menu.

The mid century town collected its memory keeper, too. Ben Sharpsteen, the Disney animator and producer whose credits ran from Pinocchio to Dumbo, retired to Calistoga and built the town a museum, opened in 1978, with a scale diorama of Brannan’s resort in its prime (Sharpsteen Museum). Small towns that keep their story straight tend to be the towns that can still sell it a century on.

The Un-Napa Corner of a Famous Valley

Everything around Calistoga kept getting more famous. In 1882 Alfred Tubbs built a stone chateau winery just north of town; ninety four years later, on May 24, 1976, a chardonnay from that cellar, the 1973 Chateau Montelena made by Mike Grgich for owner Jim Barrett, ranked first among the whites in the blind Paris tasting where nine French judges scored California over Burgundy. A bottle of it now sits in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (Smithsonian). The Judgment of Paris remade the valley’s economy and its self image, and the money moved north through the vineyards.

Calistoga absorbed the fame without converting to it. Its roadside anchors stayed defiantly unfashionable. The Old Faithful Geyser of California, uncapped by a settler drilling a well in the nineteenth century, still throws a column of hot water skyward on a loose schedule, behind a visitor center with a small geology museum and a resident herd of fainting goats (Atlas Obscura; Old Faithful Geyser of California). Ten minutes west, the Petrified Forest preserves redwoods knocked flat and fossilized in volcanic ash by an ancient eruption in the Mount Saint Helena field, a stop Stevenson himself wrote up after his 1880 stay (California Through My Lens). Neither attraction would survive a brand consultant. Both have survived everything else.

That is the un-Napa position in practice. St. Helena and Yountville, down the valley, sell polish. Calistoga sells immersion, sometimes literally to the chin in warm volcanic mud. Its spas do not require a reservation made months out, and its signature treatment costs less than most valley tasting flights once you account for what you get: an hour and a half, horizontal, offline. The product is old, slightly funny, deeply local, and impossible to copy without the aquifer.

What the Springs Pay For

The numbers say the position works. Visit Napa Valley’s 2023 visitor study counted 3.7 million visitors spending $2.5 billion across the valley, supporting about 16,000 jobs, one in five in the county, and generating $107.5 million in state and local tax revenue. Lodging taxes alone came to $69 million countywide in 2023, $14 million above the 2019, pre pandemic figure (Visit Napa Valley).

Calistoga’s share of that is existential rather than incremental. The city collects a 13 percent transient occupancy tax on its rooms, and that visitor paid tax covers roughly 75 percent of the city’s general fund, the deepest tourism dependence of any city in the valley (Visit Napa Valley; City of Calistoga). When the modern wellness boom finally arrived, it arrived on Calistoga’s terms. Solage opened on 22 acres in 2007 with a 20,000 square foot spa and a mud bar, earned a Michelin Guide hotel listing, and ran a $30 million refresh in 2021 (Auberge Resorts). Four Seasons Resort and Residences Napa Valley opened in November 2021 at the north end of the Silverado Trail with 85 rooms set inside a working winery, the first resort in the valley built that way (7×7).

The instructive part is what did not happen: the heritage anchors were not displaced. Indian Springs still swims on its 1913 pool. Dr. Wilkinson’s still sells The Works. The five star money built beside the motel era spas, drawing on the same water, and both price points fill. And once a year the town throws its own counterprogramming: the Lighted Tractor Parade, which marked its 30th year in December 2025, sends glowing farm equipment down Lincoln Avenue past more than 20,000 spectators, nearly four times the town’s population, and has landed on USA Today’s list of the country’s best holiday parades (Visit Calistoga; Napa Valley Register).

What a Visitor Does Now

A Calistoga day still follows Doc Wilkinson’s sequencing. Mud first, in the morning: The Works at Dr. Wilkinson’s, or the volcanic ash bath at Indian Springs, where the mud is mixed on site from the property’s own ash deposit. Then the water, a long float in the 1913 pool with Mount Saint Helena standing in view. Lunch happens on Lincoln Avenue, all of it on foot, with the Sharpsteen Museum’s resort diorama as the twenty minute history lesson between courses.

Afternoons split by temperament. The geology tour runs to the Old Faithful Geyser eruption and the Petrified Forest’s fossil redwoods. The wine tour runs to Chateau Montelena’s stone cellar and the castle winery down the road. The ambitious climb through Robert Louis Stevenson State Park toward the honeymoon bunkhouse site. In December, everyone ends up on the same curb for the tractor parade. Valley research says 95 percent of visitors intend to return (Visit Napa Valley); in Calistoga’s case, repeat visitation has been the business model since 1862.

Why Other Towns Should Follow Calistoga’s Lead

Calistoga’s lesson is not find a geyser. It is that a town’s most durable anchor is usually the one it started with, renewed on purpose by each generation. Brannan built the resort in 1862. The 1913 pool professionalized it. Musante bottled it in 1924. The Wilkinsons ritualized it in 1952. Solage and Four Seasons capitalized it between 2007 and 2021. Five eras, one product. The town never had to invent a new reason to visit, only to keep the old reason in working order and keep telling its story.

The second lesson is positional. Inside a world famous region, the winning move for a small town is contrast, not imitation. Calistoga is the valley’s unbuttoned corner, the place where the wine day ends in a mud bath, and its identity is sharper for every tasting room it declined to become. A town that sits beside a bigger brand should ask what the brand leaves unserved, then be that thing completely.

Where geology handed a town nothing, the same play still runs on a faster clock. Detroit Lakes, Minnesota commissioned a set of Thomas Dambo trolls and drew roughly 100,000 visitors in their first season, the story we told in our flagship report on Thomas Dambo’s trolls in Detroit Lakes. The mechanism is identical to Calistoga’s: one clear, physical, photographable reason to visit, owned by the town and maintained like infrastructure. Calistoga’s version has been in working order for 160 years and still fills its pools by mid morning. That is not luck. That is maintenance.