A Springs Challenge for the New Saratoga Year 

SARATOGA SPRINGS — New year, new challenge. 

Lifelong Saratoga resident Joe Bokan has always had a hankering for the local springs. 

“The springs have always been important to my family, with many of us routinely taking mineral baths at the Roosevelt bath house. I grew up drinking the springs and so have my kids,” says Bokan, a long-time promoter of the springs, and who in his decades-long role as owner and innkeeper at Anne’s Washington Inn has encouraged inn guests to try the springs by giving out maps of the park, as well as sharing his personal recommendations. 

His favorite? Coesa, he says – which like most of the springs is located in the Saratoga Spa Park. A handful of others flow through the Congress Park and High Rock Park areas downtown, each with their own varying levels of sodium, potassium, lithium and other minerals.  

New this year – Anne’s Washington Inn, which is located at 111 South Broadway, has organized a Saratoga’s Springs Challenge.  “I thought, like the high peaks challenge, we could do something similar for our springs,” says Bokan, adding that there is no deadline regarding the challenge, and can be done whenever time permits. 

It was a tour of the springs with dowser and spring water expert Trent Millet, that first inspired Bokan to action.   

“I was so surprised how few Saratogians and visitors knew anything at all about our springs,” Bokan says. “It had had me thinking: how can we as a community better promote something so important to our health and history?” 

Last summer, he came up with the idea of a bucket-list type of challenge that involved friends and guest at the inn with the springs, and coincided with the 80th year that the inn has been in the Bokan family. 

The Inn’s main Victorian-style building was originally built for John B. Thompson, a wealthy New York City businessman who bought and developed 11 lots in the area. Constructed in 1885, the grounds sited a hospital in the early 20th century before becoming an inn operated under the direction of the Bokan family in the 1940s. 

As for the springs, it is the Mohawk tribes generally credited for heralding the waters as having special healing powers after discovering the mineral waters bubbling through the earth’s cracks. During the centuries that followed the springs were later used by private industries before Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s guidance ushered in the development of an architectural spread to mimic the great spas of Europe. 

For more information, including a checklist of springs, individual videos, and a submission page for the Saratoga Springs Challenge, go to: https://www.anneswi.com/springs-challenge.  The site also features special edition shirts for sale, with all proceeds donated to benefit the springs’ volunteer and preservation groups.