Camping Near Hot Springs in California: Soak-and-Sleep Picks

California's hot springs are not scattered at random; they trace, with a certain stubborn precision, the fault systems that make the eastern half of the state geologically interesting. Most of the serious soaks line the Walker Lane shear zone or ring the margin of the Long Valley caldera — which is to say, you are bathing in water heated by a slow magma body and routed up through fractured rock. That isn't a decorative fact. It explains why the Eastern Sierra has such an embarrassment of pools, and why the coast, outside a handful of hike-in exceptions, offers almost none.

I write from North Carolina, where our own hot springs amount to one small town on the French Broad and a single modest resort, so I approach the California map with equal parts envy and secondhand reading. What follows is a s