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Tribune News Service

Jacumba Hot Springs has been down on its luck for decades.
The town 110km (68 miles) southeast of downtown San Diego, in the US state of California, is situated on the Mexican border, where, despite its fence, undocumented migrants pass regularly and a crisis flared in 2023.
Just 640 metres (2,100 feet) north of the border lies the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. The hotel’s owners are new to town and the business.
“Everything is the first time,” says Melissa Strukel, co-owner of the hotel.

It was four years ago, early in the Covid-19 shutdown, that Strukel, a veteran San Diego designer and special-event rental entrepreneur, decided to take a drive. She wound up in a town she had never noticed before, standing outside a bedraggled old motel, smitten.
So smitten, in fact, that she climbed over a wall to get a better look. “I just knew right away that I belonged here,” she says.
Soon she learned that the motel was for sale – with a catch. The owner wanted to sell it in a 60-hectare (150-acre) package deal with most of the commercial property in town, including a service station (without fuel), several homes and storefronts, a ruined bathhouse, and a littered mess that was once a man-made lake.
Undeterred, Strukel enlisted her business partner, Corbin Winters, and they formed a plan, which involved recruiting their friend Jeff Osborne, a former client and real estate business veteran.
They would make the 24-room motel and restaurant into a resort with 18 rooms, two suites, restaurant, bar and global desert vibe, drawing on influences from Mexico to Marfa to Morocco.

They would replumb the hot springs to take advantage of the alkaline water’s “silky texture”, refill the lake, recruit a veteran general manager for the hotel and use the houses as holiday rentals, including two with their own soaking tubs.
They would build a new sense of community in Jacumba Hot Springs, where the population is 540, the median age around 62, and the median income and property values some of the lowest in the county.
The nearest full-fledged grocery store is 45 minutes away; the nearest public school is several miles down the road; and the nearest legal border crossing is an hour away, in Tecate.
“At first I was like, ‘Ah, no way,’” Osborne says.
But Osborne, 38, whose experience includes several years of house-flipping and short-term rental management, thought on it some more. He drove into town, spent a night in a tent by the lake and changed his mind.

By October 2020, a deal was done. Doing business as We Are Human Kind, the trio paid between US$1.6 million and US$3.9 million, Osborne says, declining to be more specific.
Unlike many hotel owners, all three moved to town, taking on major roles in a community short on resources and long on characters.
“This community was the end of the line for a long time,” says Sam Schultz, 69, who lives east of town at the Desert View Tower with eight dogs and at least 12 cats.
On any day, migrants might be illegally crossing the border nearby, breaching a fence that starts, stops and varies in height, a product of shifting politics and stony slopes.
Yet most of the time, border-crossers are quickly met and taken away by the Border Patrol agents who steadily cruise the dirt roads and highway.
“I haven’t seen one person [crossing] for a couple of weeks now,” says Osborne, who lives in a stone house on a knoll known as Snob Hill. “I live less than a thousand feet from the border … and I don’t lock my doors.”

The new hotel is one of the biggest changes in town since 1919. That is when a San Diego magnate named John Spreckels opened his “impossible railroad”, running tracks through Jacumba on the boulder-filled hill-and-valley path from San Diego to Yuma.
Next came Highway 80 and speculator Bert Vaughn, who built a four-storey hotel, bathhouse and a desert view tower to lure drivers travelling between San Diego and Arizona off the road. By the 1950s, a motel and man-made lake had been added.
At the town’s peak, Osborne says, “they say there were 5,000 people here on the weekends”.
But the rail line fell idle. Interstate 8, two miles north of town, stole most of the passing traffic in the 1970s. The bathhouse and four-storey hotel burned.
Since late 2023, Strekel, Winters and Osborne have been inviting the curious to explore “an unexpected escape on the dusty edge of everything”.

Most guests so far have come from San Diego County, including a lot of creative professionals, Osborne says, and “people that like things off the beaten path, that like going down dirt roads”. Rates at the hotel typically start at US$180 on weekdays, US$360 on weekends.
Guests can be seen lounging around the outdoor Solstice Pool and Ritual Pool – where sometimes movies are screened – or inside in the Echo Room’s warmer soaking tub.
The Exotic Desert Hideaway Bar – as dim as the desert day is bright – features kitschy nudes on the walls, DJs on weekends, US$5 beer during happy hour and a US$78 cocktail situation known as “The Fortune Teller” that comes flaming in a cauldron, includes tequila and serves six.
Down the block, Kirk Gilliam usually has his gallery open on weekends. Next to the gallery, David Lampley sells vintage clothes at the Impossible Railroad Trading Post and serves as director of auditory and visual experiences for the hotel.
Out at the born-again lake, Coyote – a 67-year-old junkyard proprietor with a booming baritone voice and a truck that says “UFO retrieval and repairs” – has contributed three kayaks and a canoe for anyone who feels like paddling.

Though the old bathhouse down the street remains in ruins, it is busy almost every Saturday night. That is when the hotel team dresses the roofless structure up with bistro lights and candles and invites an eclectic mix of musicians to play under the stars.
Besides mushy love songs, tunes including sea shanties, Latino ditties and rockabilly tracks have been heard.
“I’ve been coming out here since I was a teenager, and I never told anyone about it,” says singer-songwriter Mary Simich, 31. “I was afraid people would ruin it.”
Now Simich, who lives about a two-hour drive away in Orange County, is trying to buy a house in town.
The border remains a wild card, but this dusty little town is already in transition.
Strekel, Winters and Osborne say occupancy at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel is now running above 90 per cent.
Entrepreneur Max Daily, semi-famous in San Diego for running the pop-up Oslo Sardine Bar, has announced plans to open an eatery on Old Highway 80 with a stage for live music. Possible name: the Jacumba Yacht Club.
Meanwhile, at DeAnza Springs – a former nudist resort north of Jacumba – new owners Luke Wasyliw and Kevin Cho have made clothing mandatory, upgraded infrastructure and boosted a focus on wellness, glamping and weekend music festivals, including Youtopia, an October gathering aimed at devotees of Burning Man.
“It’s gentrification,” says neighbour Sam Schultz, sitting near the entrance of the Desert View Tower. “And a certain amount of gentrification is good for us around here.”


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A home, referred to by locals as the China House, sits on a perch overlooking the U.S.-Mexico border in Jacumba, CA on Sunday, February 15, 2015.Jacumba is located an hour East of San Diego. Photo: Getty Images

(From left) Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel co-owners Corbin Winters, Melissa Strukel and Jeff Osborne outside the old service station that serves as their office, in Jacumba Hot Springs in San Diego county, in the US state of California. Photo: TNS

An old bathhouse in Jacumba Hot Springs, without water or roof, is now where the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel stages weekly candlelight concerts. Photo: TNS

The Exotic Desert Hideaway Bar at the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. Photo: TNS

Jacumba Lake is a recently revived reservoir fed by the same springs that feed the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel. Photo: TNS

A home, referred to by locals as the China House, sits on a perch overlooking the US-Mexico border in Jacumba. Photo: Getty Images

The Desert View Tower east of Jacumba was built as a tourist attraction in the 1920s. Photo: TNS

Inside the roofless old bathhouse in Jacumba. Photo:        Instagram/jacumbahotspringshotel

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Travel & Leisure

Three entrepreneurs behind the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel in California are turning the sleepy border outpost into a must-visit for explorers


Three entrepreneurs behind the Jacumba Hot Springs Hotel in California are turning the sleepy border outpost into a must-visit for explorers.


Travel Destinations

United States