Scottsdale Spas: Your Link to Luxury

Hiking: Adventure can be found on Scottsdale's extensive network of trails, which wend their way up, down and through the saguaro-cactus-spiked Sonoran desert with its rising craggy mountains and boulders.

The Spa at the Four Seasons Resort offers an entire program for hikers, starting with hikes themselves, including a regularly scheduled morning expedition to nearby Pinnacle Peak Park, so-called Yoga for Hikers, which focuses on postures that stretch and strengthen the muscles used in hiking, and its Healing Hiker's Massage, which particularly focuses on the leg muscles and uses an oil that includes mountain arnica, an anti-inflammatory. It's best to end up at one of the resort's salt-water pools to relax with a Prickly Pear margarita. If you're traveling without kids, you'll especially appreciate the adult-only pool .

Basking: Of course, you can come to Scottsdale and do nothing but spa hop. For a full-day spa experience, it's hard to beat the elegant and well-thought through Spa Avania at the Hyatt Regency Scottsdale at Gainey Ranch. This spa is based entirely around the time of the day. From the flavor of the water in the pitchers placed strategically throughout, to the varieties of tea (hot and iced), to the music you can select in the treatment room, everything changes from morning to the afternoon to the evening.

New this winter season, Avania will be offering an entirely new Thai massage treatment program. Between treatments, lunch on light "spa flights," small tapas-style bites. Food options also change throughout the day. Or just lounge around the French Celtic mineral pool and marvel at summer temperatures in the middle of winter.