Best Hot Springs Near Portland
While not exactly near Portland—it’s in the opposite corner of the state—Alvord Hot Springs is well worth the seven-hour drive.
The Pacific Northwest is a place of rich geothermal activity—just take a look at our volcanoes. All that underground hubbub also gives us hot springs, and in dramatically different landscapes. They vary in terms of frills and vibes, but here are nine of our favorites, organized by proximity to Portland. (In a sauna mood instead? We’ve got you covered.)
Past the hotel lodging, nestled against the trees, sits the 1930s-era bathhouse of Carson Hot Springs.
Carson Hot Springs
Carson, WA | One hour from Portland
If it’s another era you seek, Carson Hot Springs is the hot springs for you. Perched 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, but the service you want is the 50-minute bath-and-wrap ($35 weekdays and $40 weekends), which begins in a gargantuan 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 tables, where fellow bathers lie swaddled like mummies. Request a tight tuck, and your attendant will wrap you forehead to toe in linen and wool. You will proceed to have the most relaxing 25 minutes of your life, and, for at least a moment afterwards, will feel fortified, refreshed, and maybe even ready for another day in 2025. —Rebecca Jacobson
Tub filling is DIY at Bagby Hot Springs.
Bagby Hot Springs
Mount Hood National Forest | 1 hour 45 minutes from portland
Bagby Hot Springs requires a hike. Not a long or tough hike—just 1.4 flattish miles, over soft duff and through mossy old-growth forest teeming with ferns. But that hike 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. (Fun fact: Portland author Jonathan Raymond, who wrote the short story on which that film is based, worked on an earlier Plazm magazine shoot at Bagby starring Todd Haynes as Bigfoot. Plausible habitat, honestly.) Anyway—two bathhouses, dating to the 1980s, are in use today; a third was condemned in 2018. They’re the definition of rustic: 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. In 2011, an Oregonian story about Bagby described “earth mamas and moon daddies lolling half-naked,” and while such sorts may appear today, vanilla-seeming visitors are in hearty supply, too. Communal soaking is encouraged, and clothing is optional, though expect more swimsuits here than at, say, Breitenbush. New managers, who also own and operate Hot Lake Springs (see below), arrived two years ago and hope to rehab the condemned bathhouse, bring back the hollowed-out cedar logs that once served as soaking tubs, and add yurts at the nearby campground. —RJ
In addition to serene soaking pools, Breitenbush boasts one of Oregon’s finest saunas.
Breitenbush Hot Springs
IDANHA, OR | Two hours from Portland
With communal meals in a 1920s-era lodge, song circles and sound baths, and river rock–lined soaking pools with mountain views, Breitenbush Hot Springs resort feels part summer camp, part storybook getaway. Tucked into the Willamette National Forest east of Salem, the 153-acre resort—the largest privately owned site of its kind in the Pacific Northwest—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 one of the three mountain-view pools (the hottest of these is silent) or cycling through the quartet of tubs that range in temperature from 100 to 110 degrees. Beyond these communal affairs, clawfoot tubs for one or two dot the property. A glacier-fed river provides the water for the cold plunges, and the sauna sits atop a capped geyser that would, according to the resort, regularly shoot 30 feet into the air were it not sealed. A cute cedar hut with Hobbit-size doors, it’s dim and steamy inside. Below, the geyser gurgles, sounding positively alive. —RJ
After six years shuttered, Kah-Nee-Ta reopened in summer 2024.
Kah-Nee-Ta Hot Springs Resort
Warm Springs, OR | Two Hours from Portland
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; those who wanted to actually soak in the spring’s water had to visit the spa’s soaking tub. However, the newly reopened Kah-Nee-Ta has returned focus to the mineral-rich natural spring that surges into its soaking tubs and pools. Resort literature and posted signs tout the purported physical and mental health benefits of the water’s magnesium, potassium, and dozens of other minerals. Pools hover between 100 and 110 degrees, with a row of polar plunge tubs providing contrast therapy potential. Still, Kah-Nee-Ta 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 in close proximity to the kid zone, and parents casually watch their kids from here, nursing huckleberry beers in plastic pint glasses from the tile-lined edge. For more seclusion, the reservable riverfront cabanas have private tubs with adjustable heat levels, looking out over the river and its gentle rapids. —Brooke Jackson-Glidden
Terwilliger Hot Springs
Willamette National Forest | Three Hours from Portland
Despite the circuitous mountain roads, patches of loose gravel, surprise slicks of ice, and fallen rocks you must traverse to get there, the parking lot at Terwilliger Hot Springs will likely be full on a chilly weekend morning, cars lined up to snag a spot. While you wait, peer over the cliffside at the steep and dusty banks of Cougar Reservoir diving into the blue below, or at the charcoal combs of wildfire-scorched conifers. A two-hour pass is $12, and when you finally get the go-ahead from the park ranger, follow a half-mile, creekside trail that weaves among frosted boulders and fallen logs. Visitors 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 scale down the slope. (Steps can be icy, so tread carefully.) The warmest abuts an icy stream, ideal for a quick splash. The second coolest pool, fed by a short waterfall from the one above, is the deepest, with a naturally formed stone seat under the natural shower; it’s an awfully nice place to sit and soak in the northern hills. On weekends, expect pools packed with college students and young couples; weekdays are mellower. —BJG
Hot Lake Springs
La Grande, OR | Four Hours from Portland
Ten miles from La Grande in Eastern Oregon, the Lodge at Hot Lake Springs exudes a Lynchian eeriness. Is it the isolated locale, the gray brick peeking out from the carpeted hallways, the emptiness of the mosaic-tiled parlor, the collapsing wooden structures near its grounds? 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. The property 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 perfectly pleasant hotel with a restaurant and movie theater, with Colonial architecture touches and some newer (and welcome) updates. Shoring up the Shining vibes, the lodge is supposedly haunted, appearing on an episode of the Freeform show Scariest Places on Earth, as well as in the music video for Laura Gibson’s somewhat spectral-sounding “La Grande.” —BJG
At Summer Lake, soak in a 1920s-era barn remade as a pool house.
Summer Lake Hot Springs
Summer Lake, OR | five hours from Portland
In the rugged, sparsely populated part of the state known as the Oregon Outback, where scrubby sagebrush plains give way to dramatic fault-block escarpments and shallow alkali lakes, 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.) This privately owned spot on the south side of Summer Lake boasts a charmingly tumbledown 1920s-era barn remade as a pool house (note that it’s closed till May), plus several outdoor rock alcoves that turn magic at night when the Milky Way reveals itself; this area has some of the most pristine dark skies in the world. 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 sweetly decorated cabins with geothermal heating, full-hookup RV sites, and a five-acre dry camping field. —RJ
The main draw to Crane is the public pond, more than six feet deep in the middle.
Crane Hot Springs
Burns, OR | Five and a half hours from portland
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 (fish, bear, owl). Private tubs are available, but the real draw to this hot spring 25 miles outside of Burns is the public 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
Alvord Hot Springs
Princeton, OR | Seven hours from Portland
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 converted military bunkers turned clunky cabins. Unless the campground is at capacity, day use is allowed ($25 cash or $30 credit), and call ahead in the warmer months. The hot springs compound is also in the shadow of Steens Mountain, the 50-mile-long fault-block geological feature you had to drive around to get there, and which is worth taking a few days to explore on its own. —MS
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