Tucked in a narrow wooded canyon on the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge, the bathhouse dates to the 1930s and still feels a little like it. There’s a swimsuit-required, 104-degree communal pool in a newer building, but the service you want is the 50-minute bath-and-wrap ($35 weekdays and $40 weekends), which begins in a private clawfoot tub. Cloth shower curtains separate you from the others—there's a men's side and a women's side—and most people go naked. Near-scalding water gushes from the spigot; a cold tap provides relief. After 25 sulfur-scented minutes, an attendant guides you to a wood-paneled room lined with cots, where fellow bathers lie swaddled like mummies. Request a tight tuck, and your attendant will wrap you forehead to toe in linen and wool for the most relaxing 25 minutes of your life. —Rebecca Jacobson

The hike to Bagby—1.4 flattish miles, over soft duff and through mossy old-growth forest teeming with ferns—is an integral, mood-setting part of a visit to these public springs. Pay the $5 soaking fee at the trailhead and then take it slow, like the guys in Old Joy, the 2006 Kelly Reichardt­–directed tale of two friends trying to reconnect. Two bathhouses, built in the 1980s, are in use today; a third was condemned in 2018. They’re rustic, defined: simple wood frames, half-roofs for an indoor-outdoor experience, cedar shingles shimmering with lichen. A Rube Goldberg–esque series of plastic tubes and wooden flumes keeps the 136-degree, mineral-rich water flowing to round wooden tubs. Communal soaking is encouraged, and clothing is optional, though expect more swimsuits here than at, say, Breitenbush. —RJ

With shared meals in a 1920s-era lodge, song circles and sound baths, and river rock–lined soaking pools with mountain views, The 153-acre resort has spent the better part of a century as a wilderness health spa, and since the late ’70s has functioned as a worker-owned cooperative. (A day-use pass is $35, while overnight lodging starts at $112.) Completely off the grid, heat and power are geothermally generated, and clothing is optional. Cell service or Wi-Fi? Ha. The lack of distraction makes the soaking especially delicious, whether you’re in a mountain-view pool or cycling through the quartet of tubs that range in temperature from 100 to 110 degrees. Clawfoot tubs for one or two also dot the property. A river fed by glaciers in turn feeds the cold plunges, while the sauna sits atop a capped geyser that would, according to the resort, regularly shoot 30 feet into the air were it not sealed. —RJ

From its 1960s opening to its closure in 2018, this Warm Springs Reservation resort was less about the hot springs and more about the resort, with towering waterslides and a humongous swimming pool. Since reopening in summer 2024, Kah-Nee-Ta has returned focus to the mineral-rich natural spring that surges into its soaking tubs and pools. Pools hover between 100 and 110 degrees, with a row of polar plunge tubs providing contrast therapy potential. It remains a family-friendly joint, and kiddos with floaties and pool noodles flock to the maitake-shaped fountain and the lazy river. The toastiest soaking tub is more of an adults-only affair, large enough to accommodate several groups with plenty of space. It’s still near the kid zone, and parents casually keep watch from here, nursing huckleberry beers in plastic pint glasses. For more seclusion, reservable riverfront cabanas have private tubs looking out over the river and its gentle rapids. —Brooke Jackson-Glidden

Despite sometimes dodgy mountain roads, expect the parking lot at Terwilliger to be full on a chilly weekend morning, cars lined up to snag a spot. While you wait, peer over the cliffside, where Cougar Reservoir's steep and dusty banks dive into blue below, or at the charcoal combs of wildfire-scorched conifers. A two-hour pass is $12, and you'll follow a half-mile, creekside trail that weaves among frosted boulders and fallen logs. Disrobe at a ramshackle hut; Terwilliger is clothing optional, though nakedness varies day to day. Below, find four tiered, rock-lined pools, cooler as they descend the slope. The warmest abuts an icy stream, ideal for a quick splash. —BJG

The Lodge at Hot Lake Springs exudes a Lynchian eeriness. Is it the isolated locale, the gray brick peeking out from carpeted hallways, the emptiness of the mosaic-tiled parlor, the collapsing wooden structures nearby? Or is it the lake itself, shallow, still, and deceptively inviting as steam rises from its surface? The lake—Ea-Kesh-Pa to the Nez Perce—is serene but scalding, between 180 and 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The resort cools the water to a more tolerable 100 to 106 degrees before it flows into stone, brick, and concrete tubs perched above the lake’s banks. Hot Lake has long been used as a healing space, first by the Nez Perce and then by settlers; it was a common stop on the Oregon Trail, and became a popular hotel and sanatorium in the early twentieth century, visited by people like the Mayo brothers (of Mayo Clinic fame). Today, it’s a pleasant hotel with a restaurant, a movie theater, and Colonial Revival touches.  —BJG 

In the rugged, sparsely populated part of the state known as the Oregon Outback sits a low-frills soaking stop that’s somewhere between Little House on the Prairie and Burning Man. (Indeed, it’s a well-established pit stop for Burners.) The property boasts a charmingly tumbledown 1920s-era barn remade as a pool house, plus several outdoor rock alcoves that turn magic at night when the Milky Way reveals itself. The untreated water, which travels along a fault line from an aquifer nearly a mile below the earth’s surface, is high in silica, which leaves skin feeling silky. You’ll have to spend the night to enjoy the pools; options include full-hookup RV sites, a five-acre dry camping field, and sweetly decorated cabins with geothermal heating. —RJ

A slew of renovations has turned the quaint old pond and handful of hippie outbuildings and tepees once known as Crystal Crane into a much slicker affair, with bench seating in the large public pond, paved edging and handrails, and animal-themed cabins. Private tubs are available, but the real draw to this hot spring 25 miles outside of Burns is the communal pond, more than six feet deep in the middle and spacious enough that you don’t need to worry about knocking knees with your neighbor. Floaties are welcome. Day-use fees are $15 per person, with discounts for kids, seniors, and Harney County residents. —Margaret Seiler

The soothing, steaming water, the friendly strangers, the impressively repurposed hunks of wood and metal creating tub seats and a windscreen…this hot spring could be anywhere and it would be a pleasant spot. But it’s not just anywhere, and the setting is what makes it worth the seven-hour drive from Portland to the opposite corner of the state. The concrete soaking tubs sit on the edge of the Alvord Desert, the otherworldly, 84-square-mile dry lake bed that should be on every Oregonian’s bucket list. (Even if you’re not soaking, the privately owned hot springs property offers some of the safest access to the playa, weather permitting, for a $10 fee.) There’s a campground and a spot for RVs (no hookups), as well as some military bunkers converted to clunky cabins. Unless the campground is at capacity—consider calling ahead to check—day use is allowed ($25 cash or $30 credit). —MS