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Surrounding rocks, once warm to the touch, were cold.

Renowned for their purported healing properties, the waters were mentioned by some of the first European visitors to the region. Boston fur trader Joseph Ingraham sailed into the area in 1791 and reported seeing steam rising from the pools, prompting him to dub the area “Smoke Bay.”

Francis Poole, a copper prospector who became the islands’ first white resident in 1862, later described the spring as “miraculous.” After being told that springs were a “cure for all diseases,” Poole advised his blacksmith, who had fallen ill with rheumatic fever to take a canoe to the sacred island.

A few days later, the blacksmith “reappeared … not only fully restored in bodily health, but quite altered in a moral sense also,” wrote Poole in an 1872 account of his time on the islands.

The area surrounding the hot springs is largely uninhabited, although it is near SGang Gwaay llnagaay, a Haida village of 300 that was abandoned in the 1880s following a devastating smallpox epidemic.

On Tuesday, local lodge owner Tassilo Goetz Hanisch became one of the first to notice that the heated waters were gone.

“Normally, you could hear water bubbling but there was nothing to be heard,” said Mr. Hanisch, who was passing by Hot Spring Island enroute to his home on Kunghit Island. “It’s just dried up, green mud.”

Many other smaller pools around the island were similarly extinguished. Hot Spring Island’s heated ground has long spawned “thermal meadows” of unique flora and fauna on the island, all of which is expected to disappear in the coming years.