Why just face your fears when you can walk right over them? The way my stomach rises to my throat while I’m Philippe Petit-ing across this laughably narrow suspension bridge is a pretty compelling reason. The Arizona landscape holds me in from all sides, the rugged canyon rising from 100 feet below. The terrain is dotted with giant cacti, the likes of which I’d only ever seen before on children’s pajama patterns. These goofy-limbed fauna have been making me smile ever since I touched down in the southwest. But smiles are tricky to sustain when you are fairly certain that you are about to die.
I grip the steel guardrail that my harness is double-locked into and try to ignore my surroundings. I focus on the eyes of my gentle guide, Ryan. I’ve been told he’s a goat—not a Simone Biles G.O.A.T., but the kind of guy whose idea of a “day off” involves scampering up mountains. Right now, though, he’s more of a service animal, coaxing me from inches away as I walk this 200-foot-long plank. The iron structure was custom-designed to be extra narrow and transparent, in order to instill all the more terror in those who sign up to cross it. My stomach is in my throat. Why did I say yes?
“Who in your family might like this?” Ryan asks in his gentle voice. “My daughter,” I manage as I take a step towards him. He nods and asks how old she is. I feel the wind against my cheeks as the suspension bridge sways ever so slightly. I am a rictus of terror. I cannot remember her age. I don’t know how to speak at all. “You’ve got this,” Ryan assures me. The stench of fear rises off my skin. I take another baby step forward.
I’d been hemming and hawing about doing this part of Castle Hot Spring’s adventure course until a few hours earlier, when I met a lively mother-daughter duo on a morning hike through slot caves and under ancient Indigenous petroglyphs. “You’ll be fine,” the mother, a North Carolina resident who used a walking stick, told me. “I did it and I’m a senior citizen on Medicare!” Her daughter, a Jessica Simpson lookalike, swore up and down that she shared my phobia of heights. “You have to do it,” she said. “It’s terrifying but it’s incredible. You’ll be fine.”
It’s only a good 15 minutes after Ryan has guided me to safety across the canyon and I can survey my surroundings without wanting to cry that I decide she was right. I’ve come all this way for a stimulation vacation, after all—and for the first time in hundreds upon hundreds of days, I’d experienced something that sliced through the ennui.
The desire to shake things up (but luxuriously), is one that scads of other travelers share, it turns out. The resort’s new adventure programming is no less popular than massage bookings. “I wanted to take my daughter to a spa but I didn’t want it to be so sedentary,” Jessica Simpson-twin’s mother had told me on our hike. She was sick and tired of waiting for the pandemic to wrap up, and the last thing she wanted was more sitting around after living in lockdown. Hers was a different version of the same sentiment that brought me to the Bradford Mountains, 60 miles northwest of Phoenix.
Castle Hot Springs is named for the turret-like mountain peak that looms over the geothermal waters where Native Americans used to hold sacred ceremonies and in which weary miners and well-heeled tourists have been soaking their ailments away since the 19th century. Ever since the resort opened for business in 1896, it's been one of America’s greatest curative destinations—like Bath, England, but with better weather. In the golden age of railroad travel, families like the Roosevelts, the Pews and the Astors would come here via train and stagecoach for long stretches of the winter. A fire that broke out in 1976 led to the property’s closure for more than 40 years. Reopened under new management in 2018, the resort has been painstakingly restored. With its Zen-luxe campus, luxurious private cabins, and stunning vegetable farm that brings new meaning to “farm-to-table” dining—it’s worth a multi-day train and stagecoach journey, let alone a quick flight and taxi ride.
When the property shut down at the outset of the pandemic, management built the aerial walkway and Via Ferrata, a rock-climbing course that involves gripping and stepping across iron clamps that have been drilled and epoxy glued into the canyon surface. Via Ferrata is a technique that originated in Italy around the time Castle Hot Springs opened and it remains popular in Europe, especially in the Dolomites. Wrapping three-fourths of a mile along the canyon wall, with a high point of 500 feet, it takes guests three hours to complete.
Ryan takes me through a mini-version of the course he uses to train newbies, showing me how to clip and unclip my harness from one portion of the iron cable to the next as I scrabble across the rocks. The process—snap off, snap on, find your footing, repeat—is absorbingly repetitive, like wrapping dumplings or doing the grapevine. If if weren’t for the skyscraper height of the real course, I’d sign up. The other component of the new adventure program, a replica Wild West shooting range, is similarly satisfying. Ryan guides me through a series of “toy” guns and rifles, laying them out on the cedar table in chronological order, not unlike a sommelier preparing a flight of wine. He fills them up with shiny silver pellets that call to mind cupcake decorations. I start with one of the older models, a Colt revolver with a handsome cream handle. Turns out I have decent aim, and every time a pellet hits the target, I light up. Don’t get me wrong: I abhor guns, but this is more fun than scrolling dead-eyed through Instagram.
My Arizona adventure started a few days earlier, when my plane touched down in Phoenix. I got acclimated to the Southwest’s open sky and fabulous fauna at another golden age gem, the city’s iconic Arizona Biltmore hotel, which also underwent a massive pandemic restoration. Designed in the 1920s by Albert Chase McArthur, an acolyte of Frank Lloyd Wright, the property was a favorite of presidents and Marilyn Monroe, who liked to linger by the pool and watching diving contests. The recent $80 million renovation saw the addition of another pool, where girls trippers like to while away the afternoon. Venture a little further and you’ll likely get lost, in both space and time. Depending on which part of the 39-acre property I was in, I thought I was on a meditation retreat or had slipped through a portal and into Hollywood’s golden age, a hallucination aided by the lobby’s Art Deco gold leaf ceiling and the meticulous engravings of the “Biltmore bricks,” whose abstract pyramidal pattens are said to be inspired by the trunks of native palm trees.
The property’s cottages are now home to ultra luxe suites with indoor and outdoor gas fireplaces as well as cashmere blankets, Smeg tea kettles, and bathroom tiles to die for. And let us not forget the head-to-toe rebuilt Tierra Luna spa, where the earth-toned textile wall art and crystal-ornamented treatment garden (still in the works, but looks pretty ready to me) are very school of Gwyneth Paltrow. I enjoyed a facial with a lovely woman named Lisa who squeezed dirt out of my pores while urging me to start treating my face like a porcelain plate (“you wouldn’t wash a valuable treasure with hot water”). My time with Lisa was its own adventure, but the adrenaline levels spiked when I embarked on a vigorous sunrise hike in the city preserve. My guide, Armand, warned me not to touch my phone while we worked our way up the dusty and treacherous Quartz trail. “Stay on the path!” he continually reminded me. When I approached a cactus that was dark and flat as a hat, he panicked. “Be careful!” He reminded me, and sounded his refrain: “It’ll stab you, prick you, bite you!”
Night falls like an anvil at Castle Hot Springs, which limits guests to about 50. It’s not yet eight o’clock, and stars scatter across the inky sky. After a five-course feast of edible flowers and candy-sweet tomatoes that a crack team of farmers tend to mere yards from the kitchen, my husband and I set out for the famed waters. A lush silence hangs in the air as we work our way up the dirt path. That is, until we’re halfway to the mineral baths, and we hear a rustling. Animal faces poke out from behind the agave plants. It’s the javelinas we’d heard about, enormous pigs that belong to the rodent family. Terrified, we run back toward the cabin, but we run into another adult mother-daughter group, who laugh and offer to protect us.
At the end of the road, I shed my robe and submerge my body into the sacred mineral-rich waters. Up above, a cactus silhouette overlaps the full moon like a Matisse cut-out. The earth has heated the water, and all I smell is the mineral aroma of the rock walls.
I flip onto my stomach and give myself over to the water’s soothing heat and the calm around me. The first thing to slip away is my sense of gravity. Next to go is my mind, and the myriad anxieties I have been holding onto. My residual fears melt away. How could anyone possibly be afraid of anything when they're flying so high?
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