Mapping in the Spring

We took a trip to Manitou Springs, Colorado recently. Manitou Springs is known as a spa town and for the Pike's Peak cog railway to the summit of Pike's Peak. I enjoy mountain towns and this one is no exception.

We took an afternoon of sight-seeing and decided to sample the mineral springs around town. OpenStreetMap did not have the spring locations at the time so we decided to fix that. I didn't have a GPS with me on this trip so we had to rely on a hotel guidebook and our native cunning to find our way to the springs. The map in the guidebook really left a bad taste in my mouth. Here's hoping that they take advantage of OpenStreetMap and improve their tourist map.

The TIGER data in Manitou is mostly untouched since the import and is also mostly really, really bad. This town needs a mapping party. A few aerobically fit mappers (elevation 6,400 feet!) can make wonderful example of Manitou Springs in pretty short order. Some of this fix up can be done with the aerial images, but tree cover stifled me in some spots.

Without a GPS on hand, I had to rely on the aerial images to locate the springs properly. The Y!WMS is pretty good for Manitou, though you may notice an offset as you change zoom levels. I also took plenty of photos that helped where dead reckoning and memory failed me.

We tagged the springs as both amenity and natural and it looks great on the cycle map. Perhaps I should add a tourism tag as well to get them on to the default mapnik?

name = Cheyenne Spring
amenity = drinking water
natural = spring


This map / sculpture is on the main street of Manitou Springs and is better than the hotel guidebook we had. Alas, too big to fit in my pocket.

What of the springs? We tasted ten of the Snitcher's Dozen springs that we found. The eleventh was behind a locked door at a business closed until tourist season. Sorry, Closed Business; no link for you. Make the Navajo Geyser publicly accessible.

The flavours of the springs differed and some were more highly recommended than others. A native insisted that the Iron Spring tasted like sucking on a rusty pipe. I didn't mind it. Madame Justice muttered something about it tasting like ass. The rest of them we found to be mostly fizzy. Perhaps our palates aren't refined enough to appreciate the value of 210ppm versus 130ppm of various mineral salts.

Our favourite spring was the Twin Spring which seemed the sweetest of the springs and is recommended by the locals with a little instant lemonade powder.

Some springs are known for good moods as they have some naturally occurring Lithium salts. Now I don't know if the springs have enough Lithium to be considered medicinal, but since the medicinal dose and lethal doses overlap, I kind of hope not.

We ran into natives at two of the springs. You can tell the natives because they lack the camera and the gasping for oxygen common in tourists. At Seven Minute Spring one native was filling two two-litre bottles. At Wheeler Spring a native stopped long enough to slurp a handful of water during his walk.