Hot Springs National Park is the strangest national park in the country, and I mean that as a recommendation. It doesn't start with a gate and a welcome sign at the edge of wilderness. It starts on a city block in downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas, where a row of early 20th-century bathhouses stretches along Central Avenue — the grand Fordyce now a visitor center, the Buckstaff still operating as a working bathhouse since 1912, thermal water piped directly from the mountain behind them at 143 degrees Fahrenheit. It is, by a wide margin, the only national park where you can get a thermal bath, visit a brewery, and walk a mountain trail in the same afternoon.
The thermal springs have drawn people here for at least 8,000 years. Native American tribes from across the region gathered in the valley and observed a truce while there — the hot springs as a neutral zone, a place of healing above tribal conflict. In 1832, Congress set aside the land as Hot Springs Reservation, making it the first federally protected natural area in American history, 40 years before Yellowstone. The springs drew everyone: baseball players doing spring training in the early 1900s, then, during Prohibition, an extraordinary concentration of gamblers and gangsters. Al Capone kept a suite at the Arlington Hotel. Owney Madden, the English-born New York crime boss, eventually retired here. The Gangster Museum of America on Central Avenue makes this history cheerfully explicit.
The park itself is real hiking country, with 26 miles of trails through the Ouachita Mountains. Hot Springs Mountain Tower gives you a view across the forested ridges and the city below. The Hot Springs Creek Greenway runs several miles along the water and connects the urban side of the park to the backcountry. Bathhouse Row's Grand Promenade is a half-mile brick walkway behind the bathhouses where you can see the thermal springs' collection infrastructure — the water emerges from a fault in the mountain and has been flowing hot for long enough that no one has quite determined when it began.
The Buckstaff Bathhouse still operates the old way: a thermal bath, a loofah scrub, and a hot pack. It's worth the experience not for the luxury of it but for the weirdness of being inside a building that's been doing the same thing since 1912, with the same thermal water, in a national park that happens to share a zip code with a working city.