By Soumya Karlamangla
The highway that winds along the coast of Marin County offers some of California’s most magnificent vistas, with the deep blue Pacific Ocean glittering through veils of fog. But for a handful of travelers, the views aren’t the prize.
At one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pullout is a natural spring that draws people from across the Bay Area, some of whom drive hours through traffic to get there. Many of them reject water from any other source and drink only what they say is “liquid gold” that gushes from the copper pipes of Red Rock Spring.
“To me, it feels more alive,” said Samantha Reich, who collected 50 gallons in water-cooler jugs that she strapped into her sedan with seat belts on a recent morning.
Reich, 27, is among a small number of spring water aficionados who believe untreated water, or “raw water,” contains enriching minerals that are removed from tap water during the purification process.
Many of the spring’s die-hard fans are part of the so-called health freedom movement, which opposes government public health interventions, including vaccine mandates, pasteurized milk and fluoridated water. They now have a powerful ally in Robert Kennedy Jr., who espouses many of the same views, including opposition to fluoridated water, and who is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department. (Kennedy has yet to say whether he advocates drinking raw water.)
The trend, however, alarms health experts, who say that spring water devotees are taking unnecessary risks. The country’s robust water treatment system, they emphasize, eliminates potentially deadly bacteria and parasites, and removes toxins that can cause cancer or harm children’s brain development.
Nonetheless, untreated water enthusiasts across the nation study crowdsourced spring maps and leave online comments as if they are reviewing the latest restaurants. At Red Rock Spring near Stinson Beach, the wait can be as long as 40 minutes, but the patrons are said to be friendly and the views spectacular, according to Google reviews.
“Vibrations for the soul,” one visitor wrote. “Pure water pure magic,” wrote another.
In South Carolina, vendors sell fresh watermelon, oranges and pecans behind a rural church near Blackville where people flock to collect water from two spigots in the ground. On any given day, you’ll see spring water believers crouching to fill giant bottles at the headwaters of the Sacramento River in the northern reaches of California. In rural Oklahoma, people drive hours to draw from a natural well along the highway thought to contain healing liquid.
In the past few years, Red Rock Spring, one of the rare Bay Area locations among hundreds nationwide on FindaSpring.org, has grown more popular than ever. Longtime devotees wake at 4:30 a.m. to drive there and back before work to avoid the throngs who arrive during the day.
Acolytes in the self-proclaimed “Red Rock Spring cult” have planted squash, tomatoes and other vegetables nearby, and built an altar where people leave tokens of gratitude on the rust-colored mountainside: a stack of nickels, a dried flower crown, fresh figs, a marijuana joint.
Ryan Gonzalez, 44, says that he has been drinking the “miraculous water” from Red Rock Spring for a decade, and that it has made his dreams more vivid and made him feel more resilient against illness. A few years ago, he tried to switch to bottled spring water but ultimately returned to his favorite spot, he said.
“There’s nothing like Red Rock Spring,” said Gonzalez, who has to drive an hour each way from his home in San Francisco to retrieve the water.
Gonzalez, who owns a “botanical barbershop” in San Francisco that uses plant-based grooming products, said he and his family drank only raw milk, avoided processed foods and stuck to water collected from local natural springs.
But he warned against assuming too much about his political views. He voted for Kamala Harris in the presidential race and feared that Kennedy, despite being aligned on some health matters, would push extreme anti-vaccine views. Gonzalez said he personally believed that vaccines offered more benefit than harm.
“It’s really hard to be a centrist anymore and everything is so polarizing,” he said. “People jump to conclusions very quickly.”
And not everyone who sips from the spring is motivated by a belief in raw water. On a recent morning, a UPS driver pulled over in his brown truck to replenish his reusable water bottle, a daily ritual he began after he noticed the crowds at the Highway 1 pullout along his delivery route. Several construction workers and campers also showed up to fill their bottles.
Randy Dahlgren, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies watersheds, said that compared with other natural water sources, springs tended to be safer to drink from since they originated deep in the ground and the water was naturally filtered through layers of soil that could remove microbial pathogens. Fresh spring water can contain calcium, magnesium and other beneficial nutrients, and might not contain microplastics or “forever chemicals” as some tap water does, he said.
But raw water can also be tainted with pesticides from nearby farms, contain arsenic that naturally occurs in soil, and harbor bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella that can make people extremely sick. In 2022, 19 people in Montana became ill, including one who was hospitalized, after drinking from what they thought was a spring but was actually creek drainage.
No public agency tests the water from Red Rock Spring. In fact, public agencies had trouble explaining who owned the land from which the spring originated, and its copper pipes. The highway itself is owned by the state’s transportation agency, Caltrans. But county parcel maps show that the parking lot where the spring flows from is split between Mount Tamalpais State Park and Golden Gate National Recreation Area, though neither said it was responsible for the site.
And the only way to know if the water is safe would be to regularly test it for the more than 90 contaminants that tap water is monitored for, experts said. Any single test wouldn’t be sufficient because a rainstorm could shift the flows and introduce sewage runoff from nearby farms or campgrounds.
“The idea that ‘just because something is natural is automatically good for you’ is inherently flawed,” said Daniel McCurry, a water quality expert at the University of Southern California. “There’s all kinds of stuff that’s perfectly natural that can make you very sick.”
McCurry said he drank from the tap everywhere he went in America, and that a simple, off-the-shelf water filter could remove most of what might worry people, such as trace amounts of pharmaceuticals or lead from old pipes.
And Dahlgren wondered why spring enthusiasts were “killing the environment” by driving miles for a sip when safe, high-quality water was available from the tap, especially in the Bay Area.
More broadly, water experts said that shunning tap water undermined trust in the public water system, which could have dangerous consequences.
But Red Rock Spring followers remain devout.
Gonzalez sometimes worries what he and his family would do if something were to happen to Red Rock Spring, he said. His family avoids fluoridated water, and the spring water has become one of the most fundamental parts of his life; his younger daughter has grown up on it, and coffee tastes good to him only if brewed with water from Red Rock Spring.
“When we go on vacation,” he said, “it’s one of the things I miss the most.”
