The Best Hot Springs in the US

Nothing is built over these pools: 21 seeps near Boulder Creek collect in scoops that average about a foot deep, with water running from tepid to 138 degrees. Bathe at your own risk and know why, because quality tests have found high levels of disease bacteria in the pools after concentrated visitor use, and public health officials do not recommend bathing. Removal of the Glines Canyon Dam took the road out, adding about eight miles to the walk in.

Pools sit in the northern Mojave where the San Bernardino National Forest meets Deep Creek, managed by the forest and maintained by a volunteer group, about two miles in on the Bowen Ranch Freedom Trail. Cold creek water runs right alongside the hot. Both the brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri and very high fecal coliform counts have been found in these pools, so soak accordingly.

Trail 1444 climbs steeply for a third of a mile to eight soaking pools, and the springs may not be accessible during winter. The largest, five by eight feet at 110 degrees, sits 150 feet above the North Umpqua River under a wooden open-air roof structure; the upper pool is warmer at 112, and both run about two and a half feet deep, with rock and coarse sand underfoot rather than concrete.

Hiram Terwilliger filed a cinnabar mining claim here in the 1860s and then put the site to use for mineral baths. A chain of pools steps downhill from the rock face where the source arrives at about 112 degrees, the lowest sitting at 85, each of them 3 to 12 feet across and 2 to 3 feet deep. A landslide blocked the northern access road in December 2017, and the springs did not reopen until 1 July 2019.

Hand-built rock lining channels the water into two main soaking pools at about 98 degrees, out in the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness. The walk is 8.5 miles from the Conundrum Creek trailhead with 2,500 feet of gain, finishing at 11,207 feet. Camping is not allowed at the springs, dogs are barred within 2.5 miles, and the Forest Service asks you to pack your waste out on the way back.

Volunteers shaped these pools out of rock, wood and concrete two miles southeast of Bridgeport, controlling temperature by diverting the flow through stepped channels. A 180-degree source cools to between 115 and 156 crossing the terraces, so which channel is open decides what you can sit in. Those terraces are limestone the site once sold: 60 tons went into the interior facings of San Francisco City Hall in the mid-1890s.

On the western edge of the Alvord Desert at 4,078 feet, with Steens Mountain closing the view west, a system of pipes regulates what reaches the pool and holds it near 105 while the source averages 174. Half the pool sits under corrugated sheet metal and wood and half in the open. The owners put a full-time caretaker on site in early 2013, and access is no longer free.

Two smaller pools hold between 92 and 102 degrees, drawing from a source that surfaces at 168. Thomas Cooper's family homesteaded this ground in northeastern Monroe, Utah, in 1886 and built a bathhouse in 1905; a dance hall and cabins followed. The Monroe Hot Springs name lasted until 1995, and music concerts have carried on under Mike Ginsburg's ownership since 1996.

You walk a mile and a half of forest trail to reach the bath houses in the Mount Hood National Forest. The lower one holds three two-person yellow pine soaking tubs and a large round tub on an open deck; the upper, about 100 yards off, has another round tub. The main bathhouse and its five cedar log tubs are closed for safety and slated for demolition. The largest spring runs 24 gallons a minute at 138 degrees.

Free bathing at the State Bath House is the whole argument for Thermopolis: the springs flow at a constant 135 degrees and the bathing water is moderated to 104. A square mile of land was released to the state in 1897 and became Wyoming's first park, a year after the federal government bought a 100-square-mile portion from the Eastern Shoshone for $60,000. A bison herd, held at 15 animals, grazes the pasture.

Kaiser Pass Road runs 17 miles up from Huntington Lake and over a 9,184-foot pass before it reaches six separate springs at 6,562 feet, the hottest of them 112 degrees. A summer resort and campground went up around the water in 1935, a few years after Southern California Edison finished that road for the Big Creek Hydroelectric Project.

A vacation resort grew out of these springs from 1900, when Bill and Percie Knowles opened the Chico Warm Springs Hotel near Pray, about 30 miles north of Yellowstone. The water arrives at 113 degrees and 37 gallons a minute. A hospital wing of 20 rooms followed by 1916, under a physician Percie hired in June 1912, and the geothermally heated greenhouse on the property went up in 1996.

Watsu, the water-shiatsu technique, was invented here by Harold Dull in the early 1980s, at a clothing-optional retreat whose Arsenic, Iron and Sulphur springs rise close together; a 1909 report gave their water as 90, 116 and 120 degrees. The Valley Fire almost completely destroyed the place in September 2015. The pool complex came through largely intact, and the main pools and sauna reopened in January 2019.

Fire took the grand version in 1916, four years after a resort opened here and got itself called the most noted pleasure and health resort on the Pacific Coast. What stands now, rebuilt in the 1980s, is soaking pools, hot tubs and a swimming pool, every one of them heated by the springs themselves, and all of it inside Olympic National Park, in the Sol Duc Rainforest.

Everything here goes through a retreat and conference center, which is what Alex Beamer rebuilt the upper springs into after buying them in 1977. The upper and lower pools became two separate soaking areas back in 1904, and the Bruckman family added a large pool in 1927. Over thirty springs feed the site, measuring between 198 and 150 degrees at the surface, and a flood wrecked both sets of facilities in the 1970s.

Bathhouse Row is where the soaking happens, indoors and in tubs, after water that averages about 143 degrees comes up around the base of Hot Springs Mountain. The Buckstaff and the Quapaw are the two on the row still operating as bathhouses. Forty-three thermal springs are presumed to be flowing here, on ground Congress set aside in 1832 and renamed a national park in 1921. Jug fountains dispense drinking water.