Hatch, New Mexico

Radium Springs, New Mexico, north of Las Cruces, sounds like a place you'd need a hazmat suit to visit. The truth is part chemistry, part marketing. The spot was originally called Fort Selden Springs, after the old frontier fort nearby. When a post office opened in 1926, someone ran a mineral analysis on the hot spring water and it showed just enough radium, measured in tiny microcuries, for the town to claim the name. This was the height of the radium health craze, when people genuinely believed a faintly radioactive soak cured arthritis and frayed nerves. A resort hotel went up around the wells and drew crowds chasing that glow. The radium was real but trace, and the name was pure spa salesmanship dressed up in the science of its day.