Idaho Hot Springs, Rebuilt: How to Find Your Next Soak on the New Site

If you’ve been using IdahoHotSprings.com for a while, things are going to look different on this visit. On Friday, October 23, we retired the old hand-built site, the one that had been guiding soakers to Idaho’s hot springs for years, and replaced it with a completely rebuilt IdahoHotSprings.com.

Same guide. Same springs. A much better foundation. Here’s what changed, what didn’t, and how to use the new site to find your next soak.

What didn’t change

The heart of the site is exactly what it was: a guide to more than 100 hot springs across Idaho, from roadside commercial pools to backcountry soaks that take days of hiking to reach. Idaho has roughly 130 soakable hot springs, the most usable hot springs pools in the nation, and they’re all still here, organized the same way they’ve always been: by region, with pictures, ratings, and hard-won local knowledge.

What changed is everything underneath. The old site was built page by page, by hand, in another era of the web. The new one is faster, works properly on your phone (where most trip planning happens now), and, most importantly, lets us rebuild every listing to a deeper standard than the old pages could support.

Start with the map

If you know roughly where you’re headed, the fastest way in is the statewide Idaho hot springs map. Every public and commercial spring on the site is pinned; click a pin to jump straight to its listing. Planning a road trip? String the pins together. Headed somewhere specific? Find what’s soaking nearby.

Or browse by region

Idaho’s springs cluster into five regions: North-Central, West-Central, East-Central, South-Central, and South-East. Each region has its own archive page listing every spring in it. The East-Central Idaho springs, for example, run from developed little BLM soaking sites off Highway 93 to wilderness pools in the Frank Church that are only reachable a few months a year. Browsing a region is the best way to discover a spring you didn’t know existed, which, in our experience, is how the best trips start.

What a rebuilt listing looks like

We’re working through the site listing by listing, rebuilding each one with the details you actually need before you drive out there: an at-a-glance table with access, fees, and camping rules; current conditions; real directions; safety notes; and answers to the questions every soaker asks about that spring.

The showpiece is Goldbug Hot Springs, south of Salmon, a roughly two-mile hike up Warm Spring Creek canyon to rock-walled pools and hot waterfalls. Its rebuilt listing covers the trail, the private-land easement you cross in the first quarter-mile (dogs leashed, please, since public access depends on it), the 500-foot no-camping zone around the springs, and when the pools submerge during spring runoff. This weekend it also got the photo treatment it deserves, with full-size shots of the pools, the waterfall, and those golden hills above the canyon at sunset.

That’s the template. Every listing on the site is headed to that standard, in small batches, highest-traffic springs first.

New to Idaho soaking?

If this is your first trip, start with the town that hot water built. Our Lava Hot Springs visitor guide covers the world-famous odorless hot pools (102–112°F, open 363 days a year), the Olympic swimming complex, where to stay and eat, and what to do between soaks, from floating the Portneuf to skiing Pebble Creek in winter. It’s the gentlest possible introduction to Idaho hot springs: no hiking, no guesswork, just soaking.

From there, graduate to the map, pick a region, and find the wild one with your name on it.

What’s next

Rebuilt listings will keep rolling out in batches over the coming weeks, and every old link to this site now redirects to its new home, so your bookmarks and saved pins still work. If you find a spring that needs attention (a road washed out, a fee changed, a pool gone), tell us. This guide has always been a living document, and the rebuild makes it a lot easier to keep current.

Happy soaking. We’ll see you out there.