By CHRISTOPHER SOLOMON Excerpts
from the New York Times - Friday, October
29, 2004 article:
AT 7:20 a.m., when the hikers gather, the desert heat
hasn't yet awakened, and a headlight moon still shines
over Utah's red-rock country. The air is herbed with
sagebrush. The 10 guests who have signed up for the hardest
of Red Mountain Spa's morning hikes punch buttons on
their heart-rate watches and frost noses with sunblock.
''This one's got a little bit of everything,'' the guide,
Connie Triplett, announces to the group, detailing the
4.5-mile hike up a nearby cinder cone: Some ramps across
slickrock. Some sandy stretches. Just enough climbing
among boulders to make the acrophobic among the group
nervous.
Ms. Triplett is dressed in the olive-and-tan of a safari
guide. This is misleading. She is actually a smiling
drill sergeant. At the trailhead she sets off at a
double-espresso pace. The group chases her boot prints
along a sandy wash, through gantlets of prickly pear
and cholla cactus and past creosote bushes perhaps
hiding sleeping rattlesnakes. She strides across 180-million-year-old
dunes that have hardened to rippled sandstone, pushes
past spiny agave, billy-goats up short rock walls.
Often, she calls back hiking tips and encouragement.
At a rest break, the only sound is the noise of 10
pairs of wheezing lungs.
''Any blood yet?'' Ms. Triplett asks a hiker from Detroit
-- an amply scuffed man who has been out here each morning
this week.
''I try to pick up a souvenir every day,'' he replies.
He dabs at a scratch, but smiles big.
Then Ms. Triplett is moving again, upward and into the
waking day. Coyotes yip from the juniper. The sun reaches
the horizon, and striated cliffs turn the colors of Neapolitan
ice cream.
''This is just like I imagined,'' says Michelle Evans,
39, a fit mother of three from Covington, La., breathless
as much from the view as from the hike.
''I wouldn't want to go to a spa that was just massages
and facials; I'm too active,'' Mrs. Evans says, adding
later, ''I can only be puffed and fluffed so much.''
PUFFING and fluffing? That's not the focus at the newest
breed of destination spas cropping up around the country.
Once, people went to spas to submit to celery sticks
and weight loss. Then spas bloomed as ''pamper palaces,''
all about sumptuous surroundings and morning-to-night
coddling. The latest evolution has spas providing what
a growing number of people like Mrs. Evans want: a very
active, outdoorsy but balanced vacation -- one in which
the price of the evening's pampering is their own perspiration.
The United States is home to an estimated 12,000 spas
of all stripes, a more than fourfold increase in the
last decade, according to the International Spa Association.
While the bulk of the growth has been in day spas, the
number of places generally described as ''destination''
spas has increased 170 percent since 2002, according
to the association. Increasingly, spas need a way to
distinguish themselves from the pack.
Many of the new active spas take a page -- but not much
more -- from places like the Ashram in the Santa Monica
Mountains of California, the ascetic New Age boot camp
in which participants pay $3,500 a week to do five-hour
hikes and three hours of yoga daily while subsisting
on very modest portions of vegetarian fare. ''I like
to say the New Age became the Now Age,'' said Liz Mazurski,
editor in chief of Spa magazine. ''People finally accepted
that taking a hike could be good for them, and that it
was a great way to spend a holiday -- and all the better
if after having a hike they could have a really delicious
but healthy meal and sleep in a very comfortable bed.''
And so spas from British Columbia to
the Yucatán
Peninsula of Mexico are offering carefully calibrated
combinations of high-activity days in the Great Outdoors
and fall-into-bed-tired nights, with varying levels of
frills. The costs range from $200 a night on up. At Las
Olas Surf Safaris in Hawaii, a women's surfing camp,
on-the-water lessons are mixed with yoga, good food,
body-conditioning classes and spa treatments. At Mountain
Trek near Nelson, British Columbia, guests can hike up
to 4,000 vertical feet daily with a guide, but still
return to a massage and ample food. At Cal-a-Vie, 40
miles north of San Diego, the hikes are more modest and
the spa treatments more lavish -- as is the price: $2,795
for a three-night program.
Back at the trailhead at Red Mountain Spa, Ms. Triplett
ended the hike by handing out icy face towels scented
with spearmint. It was only 10 a.m. -- leaving the group
plenty of time to fit in a post-hike stretching class,
an abs class, cardio salsa, spinning or something called
Pilates on the Ball -- with an hour or so out for lunch.
No one at Red Mountain Spa cracks the whip on guests
after the morning hike, but no one seems to make a whip
necessary. Most people hopscotch from class to class
all day, or hike or bike on their own. The hammocks scattered
about the 55-acre compound rarely fill with loungers.
At mealtime, guests show up in boots dusted with trail
dirt -- except when they arrive in their white bathrobes
because they are on their way to an Adobe Lavender Wrap.
Red Mountain is still a spa, after all, and outside
the treatment rooms, the menu of offerings runs from
the usual hot stone massages and reflexology treatments
to things like the Slickrock Survival Fango Treatment,
a mud leg wrap followed by a massage aimed at a footsore
hiker's thighs, calves and feet; pedicures with adobe
clay; and a full-body Mother Earth Wrap of local bentonite
clay, infused with lavender and aloe. Unlike most spas,
Red Mountain keeps its treatment rooms open till 10 p.m.,
so those who have been moving all day can get the lactic
acid kneaded from their sore thighs, or be coddled with
an 85-minute ''extreme sports pedicure.''
That evening, over a glass of chardonnay and a tilapia
with a pineapple-soy reduction, Mrs. Evans and her friend,
Kelly Rudolph, 44, gave a simple explanation for why
they had come to Red Mountain. ''We wanted to work out
all day and then be pampered at night -- and then fall
into bed,'' Mrs. Evans said.
Talk turned to the next day. Should they rise again
before the sun for an even longer hike, or rent bikes
and pedal to the artists' community of Kayenta? Mrs.
Rudolph jumped up -- the decision had to wait: it was
time for her hot basalt-stone massage in the spa center.
IN the early 1990's Red Mountain was an old-style fat-farm
spa offering walking and water exercise programs, along
with low-calorie meals. Later, it had a brief incarnation
as a corporate training center. Then, in 1999, with new
owners looking for a new thrust, the 109-room resort
underwent an $8 million renovation and retooling as an
adventure spa aimed at drawing in hiking enthusiasts
who would like a wrap or facial as well. Since then,
the average age of Red Mountain's guests has started
to fall to 40 to 42, said Deborah Evans, the spa's general
manager, just below the industry norm of 42 to 45. Generations
X and Y, young Americans who have grown up feeling the
appeal of the outdoors and the benefits of activities
like yoga, ''love this type of vacation because it has
everything they want in one vacation,'' said Ms. Evans,
who is no relation to the guest Michelle Evans.
''We expect our average to drop further over the next
several years,'' she added.
Also helping to keep the age down is that Red Mountain,
unlike many destination spas, doesn't require a weeklong
stay, making it appealing to younger visitors who may
have less to spend on a spa vacation.
''Right now, the industry is being shaped by spa-goers
who are savvier about the spa experience and who want
treatments that yield results,'' Lynne Walker McNees,
president of the International Spa Association, said
in an e-mail interview. ''ISPA's research shows that
the No. 1 reason people go to spas is for stress relief.
Improving mental and physical health as well as regulating
body weight are also driving factors. The future belongs
to those spas who answer this call.''
In Red Mountain's case, geography was destiny: Just
beyond the walled compound lies the playground of the
5,700-acre Snow Canyon State Park, a mini Zion National
Park of sunset-colored walls, trippy Jurassic sandstone
humps and sandy arroyos.
Hiking in and around the park is the cornerstone of
the spa's program. No other classes are offered until
11 a.m. so that guests can rise in the desert's morning
cool and take one of three guided treks of varying difficulty.
The easiest might be a pleasant two-mile trail walk in
Jenny's Canyon that gains almost no elevation and leaves
after 8 a.m. Participants on the most aggressive hike
leave a half-hour earlier and may pursue their leader
anywhere from five to eight miles over several hours
-- up ravines, over water-filled potholes, into the park's
cathedral-ish corners like Fern Gully where plants cling
to the canyon walls and are nourished by the waterfalls
that appear briefly during cloudbursts. Most of these
top-tier hikes take off at an amphetamine pace that soon
shows who lied about his fitness level on the check-in
questionnaire. Women don't glow, they sweat.
Men, too. ''This is much more wildernessy and taxing
than any other I've ever been to,'' a drenched Flip Homansky
said on another morning, as he descended a sandstone
slab during an advanced hike. Mr. Homansky, a 54-year-old
doctor and a Nevada boxing commissioner from Las Vegas,
was on his first visit to Red Mountain Spa. Already he
and the group had chugged up one canyon and turned sideways
to slip through slots in the Navajo sandstone.
That night, the memory of the morning still left him
winded. ''I mean, I was pumping -- and I'm in shape,''
he said. Though Mr. Homansky, a frequent spa-goer, was
one of a handful of men at the spa during this quiet
week in September, men are finding more to like at spas
that offer active pursuits. Ms. Evans, Red Mountain's
general manager, said her clientele was usually about
35 percent male. (Across all spas, the percentage of
male clients has risen to 29 percent, according to a
2003 survey by the International Spa Association.)
Like much else at Red Mountain, the attempt to reconcile
''good'' and ''good for you'' extends to the menu. Every
dish is marked ''cal/fat/carbs/protein/fiber,'' with
the attendant numbers. But a high-energy schedule demands
plenty of fuel, and breakfast and lunch are healthy buffets
where ravenous hikers can take as much as they want.
''There are no food police here,'' Ms. Evans said.
At dinner, entrees sit small enough on the plate to
make a big appetite blanch, at first. But after a salad,
a roasted breast of duck with herbed potatoes and strawberry-rhubarb
demi-glace and a berry cobbler, even members of today's
Big Gulp Nation begin to realize that they don't need
to leave the table stuffed. And unlike some spas, Red
Mountain doesn't withhold the pleasure of cutting the
day's trail dust with a glass of merlot or a Wasatch
Polygamy Porter.
There are spas with fancier fare, said Mr. Homansky,
a vegetarian, after dinner that night -- ''the food,
it's healthy and it's adequate,'' he said -- but if he
had wanted total pampering and white tablecloth service,
he would have gone elsewhere. His stay at Red Mountain
has left him slightly bruised from a mountain-bike tumble,
slightly scratched from hiking, slightly sore from all
the stretching. And that's just what he was looking for.
''I'll sleep well tonight,'' Mr. Homansky said, before
heading to his room. And then he would try to squeeze
in just a little more the next morning, before heading
home.
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