There is a moment, somewhere on the drive east when the city releases its grip on you. The traffic thins and the sky opens up. The mountains appear on the horizon, purple andorange-hued, and you remember that the world is considerably larger than your inbox. By the time you pull up to a desert, you understand it’s time to relax. Palm Springs, Scottsdale and Death Valley in summer is its own particular pleasure. With fewer crowd and lower rates, a desert getaway mid-year has its advantages. The pool, which in February you share with half of Los Angeles, becomes something closer to your own. Yes, it is hot, an unapologetically 110-degrees-by-noon hot. But heat, when you stop fighting it, has a way of slowing everything down to the pace your body actually wanted all along. You move slower. You eat later. You stay in the water longer. The desert in summer is not a consolation prize for people who couldn’t get away in April. It is a different trip entirely, and in many ways, a better one.We spotlight five distinctive properties that offer an authentic desert experience worthy of asummer escape The Hottest, Coolest Vacation You’ll Take This Summer.
THE OASIS AT DEATH VALLEY
Here’s a secret about travel: The best places, the truly memorable ones, are all about contrast. And if it’s contrast you’re after, there is no place more spectacular in the summer than The Oasis at Death Valley.
Now, everyone will tell you that you are out of your mind for even thinking about it. They will talk about the heat, and they will be right. The heat is formidable. But they are missing the entire point. The secret is that you are not meant to simply endure the heat. You are meant to have the perfect escape from it, which is what makes the experience so exquisite.
Imagine this: You explore the salt flats in the cool, quiet morning, when the air is still soft and the light is golden. Then, as the sun climbs, you retreat. You return to a place with rustling palm trees and a swimming pool that is, without exaggeration, the Platonic ideal of a swimming pool. The existence of a cold drink in your hand feels less like a simple refreshment and more like a profound statement on the nature of joy.
This is what The Oasis offers. It turns the magnificent, intense heat of the desert into a grand opening act for the main event: pure, unadulterated relief and luxury. And because so few people are in on the secret, you get the gift of quiet. The vast, silent landscapes feel like your own private planet.
You can choose your own kind of escape, of course. There’s the elegant, historic Inn, which feels like stepping into a glamorous black and white film. Or there’s the friendly, rambling Ranch, a perfect village where the most important decision of the day is when to have your first swim.
Don’t listen to the people who say it’s the wrong time to go. Summer is the time you’ll feel the magic most. It’s an experience for your senses, a story you’ll tell forever, and a reminder that the greatest luxury in the world is a patch of cool shade in the most unexpected of places.
You don’t go for the hiking. You don’t go for a tan. You go for the story. You go to sit by a spring-fed pool in the hottest place on earth and feel, against all odds, impossibly, deliriously alive. You go so you can say you went. And, believe me, that is more than enough.
Website : www.oasisdeathvalley.com
GRAND HYATT SCOTTSDALE RESORT
Everyone will tell you not to go to Scottsdale in the summer. People who have never even been to Arizona will volunteer this information with surprising confidence. But they are wrong.
Here is what they are not telling you: Scottsdale in summer is a secret, and like all good secrets, it belongs to the people who figured it out first. The crowds thin out. The rates drop. And the Grand Hyatt Scottsdale Resort suddenly becomes the kind of place you can afford to enjoy at the pace it deserves.
The resort is, in the most literal sense, its own world. There is a pool, water slides and a beach, an actual beach, on the property, which is proof that ambition has no geographic limits. For families, the value proposition in summer is almost unfair: kids eat free with each paying adult, rates are significantly lower than peak season, and Camp Hyatt provides a temperature-controlled environment where children can be enthusiastically entertained while parents remember what it feels like to sit still. On the Fourth of July, the resort puts on a fireworks show that has become the kind of annual tradition families build their summers around.
For adults traveling without children, there is a separate adults-only pool with VIP cabanas available to rent, which is the resort’s way of saying that everyone thought of you, too.
The spa offers summer-specific body and facial treatments, and if you have ever had a facial in a cool, quiet room while it is 108 degrees outside, you will understand that this is one of life’s more satisfying contrasts.
Then there is the food, which at the Grand Hyatt Scottsdale is reason enough to book the trip on its own. Under the direction of Richard Blais, the celebrated chef and James Beard-nominated cookbook author, the resort’s six Gainey Ranch restaurants operate as a collection of genuinely distinct experiences rather than variations on the same hotel menu. La Zozzona is a sophisticated tribute to Italian American cuisine, the kind of dinner that makes you slow down and pay attention. Tiki Taka merges Japanese sushi with Spanish tapas in a combination that sounds unlikely and tastes inevitable. At H2Oasis, the pool bar, you can lounge in a private cabana with festive cocktails and food that is good enough to make you forget you were planning to get up and do something else. You were not.
The dining moves between indoor and outdoor settings that fold Arizona’s natural landscape into the experience rather than competing with it.
Is it hot in Scottsdale in July? Yes. Spectacularly, unapologetically hot. Bring that up with the resort’s five pools, the spa, the air-conditioned restaurants, and the cabana waiting with your name on it.
Website: Grandhyattscottsdale.com
GRAND HYATT INDIAN WELLS
Grand Hyatt Indian Wells sits on 45 acres of landscape that has no business being this lush in the middle of the Coachella Valley, and yet here it is, all towering palms and mountain views that command your attention. There are 531 rooms, suites and private villas, a number that sounds imposing until you walk the grounds and understand that the property has been designed to make travelers feel at home. Families spread out in one direction. Couples find their own corners. Nobody feels crowded.
This place does a great deal for families. The crown jewel of the property is HyTides, the largest waterpark in Greater Palm Springs, and if you have small children, that sentence alone may be all you need to hear. Seven pools. Two waterslides. A 450-foot Desert Twist Lazy River that winds through the grounds on a hot afternoon. Splash pads with water cannons and cascading buckets that can occupy a toddler for hours.
Because while the children are conducting their very serious waterpark business, the adults have options. The pool reserved for grown-ups comes with private cabanas and a bar serving tropical cocktails and small bites. And then there is the spa, which is 30,000 square feet of air-conditioned, intentional, restoration. Face treatments. Body treatments. The kind of care that makes you question the cultural story we’ve been told about productivity being the highest virtue. On a summer afternoon in the Coachella Valley, when the sun is doing its scorching, the spa stops being a luxury and starts being something closer to common sense.
The golf here is serious. Indian Wells has earned its reputation as one of the country’s premier golf destinations, and the neighboring Indian Wells Golf Resort proves this point. The Clive Clark-designed Celebrity Course is a par-72 that offers the seems to make you feel slightly better about your game than you perhaps deserve. The John Fought-designed Players Course is less forgiving. Winding streams and impeccable grooming frame both, and the resort’s ”Stay and Play” packages offer accommodations with round of golf on the various courses; it’s the kind of arrangement that makes you feel you are getting away with something.
The resort offers tennis courts, pickleball and miles of trails. The desert light at 7 a.m. is something that cannot be adequately described in print, only experienced.
Dining options can satisfy the proverbial foodie as well as the pickiest eater in the party. Tia Carmen, the restaurant from acclaimed chef Angelo Sosa, brings genuine culinary ambition to breakfast and dinner. The food has the kind of seriousness that usually exists only in cities, and it has chosen wisely to set up here instead. Carmocha serves small plates and artisanal cocktails with the easy confidence of a place that knows good food doesn’t require formality. Vista Square Kitchen handles the cheerful, hungry crowds between the pools and the waterpark. And the Camino Springs Market in the main lobby offers coffee, sandwiches and locally sourced fruit for guests who are not quite ready to stop moving.
Indian Wells sits twenty minutes from Palm Springs, which is close enough to access the boutiques, the restaurants, the cultural life of its more famous neighbor, and far enough to feel like a destination in its own right. Summer here is something the region doesn’t always bother to market, and perhaps that is part of its appeal. The pace changes during those hot months.
The drive home is the hard part. The mountains shrink in the rearview mirror and the traffic reassembles. But for a weekend, you were somewhere else entirely. You were a person who sat by a pool in the desert sun, who ate a good meal without rushing, who watched the mountains change color at dusk and felt, for a few unguarded moments, that this was enough.
That is what a place like Grand Hyatt Indian Wells gives you. Not just rest. The memory of what rest feels like. And the knowledge that you can find your way back.
