In my Nevada salad days of January, when I was a mere hot-pond dilettante, I described a few thermal springs in accounts of visits to the Black Rock Desert (The Empty Quarter) and Carson City (A Hard Rain) But now that I’m entering the ranks of serious soakers, I’m going to use this Travelblog to focus on the first two trips after I began my collection in earnest. I spent Presidents’ Day weekend exploring the thermal pools in the mountain valleys south of Austin in the center of the state. And then I nixed the Caribbean and instead spent Spring Break in Nevada’s northwest corner seeking the baths along the Oregon Trail.

The tradition of soaking in a hot spring is as old as civilization. Long before we modern desert tourists made it a ritual of our own sybaritic cult, hundreds of years before the pioneers of the gold rush cooked their beans in the boiling water, the Romans made a religious ritual of their immersion in a heated bath. Because the hills of Tuscany are not, in that regard, as favored as the hills of Nevada, most of the Roman baths were artificially heated. But some, including the still-flowing waters of Roman Aquae Sulis, dedicated to the goddess Minerva (the modern city of Bath, in England) derived their energy from the fiery gods of the earth’s interior.

Steam Rising from the Trego Ditch