Suncadia's spa includes outdoor soaking spaces.
Spas take on special significance on a trip. They're an indulgence, maybe, or a reward for making it out of the daily grind. The best massages, wraps, and soaks come with local touches and scents, even landscape views. Sometimes a spa is the vacation; these ones make all the travel worth it.
Cle elum
East of the Cascades, on a sprawling golf and resort property outside Cle Elum, the relaxation rooms at Suncadia Resort’s Glade Spring Spa open up to mineral bath pools, wood-cabin saunas, firepits, and a burbling stream under the open sky. The mini wonderlands, here where the air is drier than it is by the sea, can be used by day-pass buyers with a reservation. Several therapies come with sparkling wine; the relaxation room includes giant beanbags that put college dorm furniture to shame.
Treatments turn the luxury dial higher, applying mud to minimize cellulite and detoxify or facial products to plump up the skin. Classic massages include indulgent foot and scalp treatments, and a rain-room shower rinses the remains of messy wraps and scrubs; it’s the closest thing to a downpour one usually sees in the sunny retreat. Note that prices go up on weekends, common for destination spas.
Union
In the Evergreen State, alder trees stick out; they’re not evergreen, for one; they’re deciduous, shedding their delicate leaves every year. They grow where it’s cool and wet, like the skinny Hood Canal south of Bremerton, where Alderbrook Resort sits on the canal’s southern elbow. Larger than the string of modest waterfront homes that line the canal shore, the hotel and fine-dining restaurant are still dwarfed by the trees that crowd the lowlands. Enclosed in a glass greenhouse, a full-size swimming pool faces the rocky beach and, on clear days, the towering Olympic Mountains.
Inside the spa, you can still smell the forest. Some treatments salute the outdoors, like a seaweed wrap and moor mud treatment. The menu has a big emphasis on what's appropriate for pregnant visitors—several are—and spa users can try the sauna and steam room after. It's a warm reprieve in a damp region of the state.
Semiahmoo is surrounded by water, with an earthy spa inside.
Blaine
The Semiahmoo Spit, nearly a mile long and lined with softball-size rocks, is a bony finger of Whatcom County that extends through a Salish Sea bay and almost touches Canada. Though known as a golf resort, it's also a sit-on-the-rocky-beach-and-stare-at-the-lapping-waves kind of retreat.
The salty sea is an apt neighbor for the Semiahmoo Resort spa, where the menu includes a Himalayan salt stone massage. Therapists can use CBD balm on sore spots, and a mango wrap and coconut body polish offer a more tropical escape. Two half-hour treatments, a massage and a facial, make for a quick visit, and the on-site health center has pickleball courts, a sauna and steam room, and tai chi courses.
Sorry dudes: It’s ladies only in Olympus Spa’s pink Himalayan salt room.
lynnwood
The success of the strip-mall spa can be measured by how quickly one can forget that it once shared a parking lot with a Chuck E. Cheeses. And by that measure, Olympus Spa in Lynnwood is sensational. Inside the nondescript building—spas don’t do windows—is a buzzing women’s-only Korean-style retreat. Rules are strict; robes are worn in the warm infrared rooms lined with Himalayan salt or jade, and everyone’s naked in the soaking pools and saunas. Clients wear shower caps at all times. Everyone looks like a Q-tip.
Though spa-goers can simply soak and douse themselves with mugwort (known as a women’s herbal remedy), most add a massage or Korean scrub. Other treatments incorporate cucumber, red ginseng, and yam. But unlike most Western spas, the menu isn’t limited to what’s slathered on the face and body; the in-house café dishes warm stone bowls of bibimbap, hot pot, and green tea smoothies.