There are an amazing number of fascinating and beautiful outdoor wonders out there for the outdoors enthusiast to enjoy. Certainly, those wonders include the numerous hot springs that are plentiful all over the West.

Perhaps my first exposure to hot springs as a child was the Grover Hot Springs State Park near Markleeville in Alpine County, where my family vacationed every summer. I recall being fascinated by the concept of boiling water bubbling out of the earth.

Naturally, I’m not alone in my fascination with hot springs. What seems like a lifetime ago, I taught a course in archaeology at San Joaquin Delta College. One of the sites we explored was Byron Hot Springs, about 20 miles west of Tracy on Byron Road.

Long before Columbus arrived in the New World, California Indians occupied Byron Hot Springs. They even buried their dead in the hot springs, and the bones that remained became encrusted with black and yellow mineral deposits.

We also observed a burial practice we’d never seen elsewhere: numerous burials where the head of the deceased rested upon a stone pestle, which was broken in half in every instance. Why? Quien sabe? Perhaps to signify the end of the life cycle. We simply don’t know. What we do know was that hot springs have been revered as special places by people of many cultures since before recorded history began.

Another fascinating place to experience hot springs is in the Mammoth Lakes area, on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada. Hot Creek, just east of the town of Mammoth Lakes, is famous for its trophy trout fishing.

One of the qualities of hot springs is that the hot water dissolves large quantities of minerals deep beneath the earth. When the hot water reaches the surface, the minerals begin to deposit along the edges of the hot springs. In addition, the mineral-laden waters, once sufficiently cooled, caused abnormally fast growth rates in the trout that resided there. The result? A special bonus for trout fishers: huge trout from small streams!

Another reputed benefit of hot springs is that they may have medicinal or curative properties. As far back as the ancient Romans, hot springs were popular for relieving the stress of daily life. The redwood hot tubs of the ’60s hippies were not exactly a new phenomenon. In fact, the hot tub craze is still with us, but in places, it has developed an outdoors twist.

Almost everywhere there are remote wilderness hot springs, there are handmade hot tubs constructed out of local materials. Some enterprising soul may have taken a couple hundred feet of pipe or dug a couple hundred feet of ditch to channel the flow of a hot spring to a rock drop-off of several feet, cooling the water from boiling to relaxingly hot. A tub is fashioned using rocks and mortar, and the water flows into the wilderness hot tub. Oftentimes, there is an outlet pipe with a tennis ball for a plug; you can remove the tennis ball, drain the tub and then replace the plug, so that now you have a fresh tub filled with refreshing hot water.

Such wilderness hot tubs are scattered all over the desert in hot-spring country. To find them, go for a drive in the sagebrush. Go early in the morning, when the surrounding air is cold, and look for steam rising up out of the sagebrush. Sometimes, you might find the hot spring itself, while other times you’ll find a hot tub made by fellow desert rats.

Once you have found your secret desert spa, camp nearby, but not too close — because like swallows returning to Capistrano, desert dwellers may mysteriously appear at dark.

The desert dwellers may be human, but then they might not. If you’re lucky, you may share your desert spa with rabbits, foxes and coyotes underneath an incredible display of nighttime stars.

What the heck — give wilderness hot tubbing a try!

Until next week, tight lines.

Don Moyer is president and CEO of a consulting firm and has more than 20 years’ experience working with the outdoor recreation community, including anglers, hunters, backpackers, environmental groups and the public. He can be reached at don.moyer@gmail.com.