TO UTAH, FOR Body Soul

When the Mormon leader Brigham Young developed rheumatism in the later part of his life, he built himself a winter retreat near this town. Here three great deserts--the Mojave, the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau--converge in a desolate but stunning landscape bringing to mind the region around the Dead Sea. In summer St. George is a furnace, with daytime temperatures routinely topping 100 degrees. But the rest of the year, the climate is warm, dry and easy on ailing joints, as Young found.

Lately, more snowbirds from Salt Lake City have been flocking to St. George, and condo developments, malls and nine golf courses have sprung up beside coal-red canyons and bone-dry hills. So even though the dusty little desert city pinnacled by a gleaming white Mormon temple might not be the first place you’d think of when it comes to spa vacations, it isn’t all that hard to understand why two of the country’s top-rated fitness resorts, Green Valley and Red Mountain spas, call St. George home.

Hiking, not sybaritic pleasures, is the order of the day here. Both spas send out platoons of guests every morning to march across mesas and scramble up rock faces as far afield as glorious Zion National Park. In fact, it’s the hiking that sets these two places apart and lures fitness seekers here from both coasts, even though there may be plenty of spas closer to home.

In all other respects, though, the two are as different as their names, with moderately expensive Green Valley Spa & Resort stronger on beauty and relaxation treatments, while rock-bottom-priced Red Mountain Spa focuses on dieting, helping guests lose an average of one-half to 1 1/2 pounds a day during their stay.

When I sampled both spas in late summer it was hot as the devil, which struck me as suitable punishment for the way I’d let myself go, exercising infrequently and living on fatty fast foods. I was beginning to think of my target weight as an unobtainable dream, and no one would call me the picture of vibrant health.

So you will understand why I had a good laugh when the lady sitting next to me on the spa shuttle bus from the airport in Las Vegas (120 miles southwest of St. George) told me that her daughter works for a prominent cosmetic surgeon who often sends his patients to Green Valley, post-op; by any chance, she asked, was I going there to recuperate from cosmetic surgery? An intriguing idea, a lot easier than hiking and taking aerobics classes and subsisting on carrot sticks and cottage cheese.

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As it turned out, my stay at Green Valley was vastly preferable to surgery, because Alan and Carole Coombs, who founded the spa in 1986, believe that awakening the senses through cosseting beauty treatments, therapeutic massage, healthy but creatively prepared foods, reasonable exertion and a delightful atmosphere is the true path to well-being.

The intimate health resort accommodates just 65 and occupies part of a condo complex set amid a patchwork of new subdivisions about a 10-minute drive southwest of St. George. Guests and residents alike stay in a handful of white three-story apartment blocks surrounding two big swimming pools and 20 tennis courts (home of the Vic Braden Tennis College, affiliated with Green Valley). But the spa has its own smaller, walled pool and Southwestern-style activities center containing a warren of treatment rooms, a shop, two exercise studios with weight training and cardio machines and locker rooms. There is also an airy open kitchen where meals are served and healthy snacks are available all day, and a grand hall with plush white couches, Indian rugs, potted plants and terra cotta cherubs.

As soon as you arrive, a white-caftaned nymph massages your hands; then you’re shown to your room. Mine was at the opposite end of the complex, quite a hike from the main building, in a two-bedroom, two-bath unit decorated like an Ethan Allen showroom. The full kitchen was stocked with a coffee maker and Starbucks beans, which came as a relief since no amount of inducement is ever going to get me to give up caffeine.

If you book the “seven night value package” for $2,750 (including meals, accommodations, classes, use of the facilities and five treatments) and come by yourself, you may wind up sharing a unit with a stranger. I got a roommate on my second night, a distressed-looking woman from Seattle who told me about her recent breakup with her boyfriend in the first five minutes of our acquaintance. Since ragging on men wasn’t a part of my program, I steered clear of her thereafter.

Before leaving home, I talked with a few people who’d been to Green Valley. Several cited the apartment-sharing and the mixing of spa guests with condo residents as weaknesses of the spa. To address the problem, the owners are building 35 guest units, scheduled for completion by the end of the year. They are also adding a golf program to teach corporate women a sport that comes in handy in the business world--and to attract more male spa-goers.

The Coombses are not only responsive, they are also extremely attentive to detail, seeing to it that staff members learn your name, decking the spa center with fresh flowers in a different color scheme every day, and supplying guests with workout suits, terry-cloth robes and slippers. When you head off for a morning hike, there are iced washcloths in plastic bags to take along for wiping off sweaty limbs. And at night the maid leaves an herbal tea bag and a page of sleepy-time thoughts by Mother Teresa or the Dalai Lama on your bed (which I was always too exhausted to read).

Best of all are the freebies, which include a lavender-scented eye pillow and jars of exfoliant, skin toner, milk and honey bath, and indigo body cream--made right there at the spa of desert salts and botanicals-- to be used back home when you’re trying to re-create the Crushed Pearl Body Rub, one of Green Valley’s signature beauty treatments.

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I spent my days attending classes in aerobics, stretch, yoga, cardio boxing and Spinning, a popular stationary bike exercise that struck me as fairly mild. I also wrestled with a rubber exercise toy called a Hydro-Noodle in the pool, worked on my tan and read Arthur S. Golden’s “Memoirs of a Geisha.” Precisely what you’d do at any spa. That is, except first thing in the morning, when Green Valley incorporates southwestern Utah’s chief attribute--its nonpareil landscape--into the spa regimen.

In the summer, three or four hiking groups in levels from easy to advanced leave at 6:30 a.m. to avoid the worst of the heat. For me it was a five-miler to Angel’s Landing in Zion National Park (an hour northeast by van) on the first day, followed by a tougher seven-mile trek through pretty Padre Canyon on the second. On the third I did a six-mile hike as the sun rose over the Colorado Plateau, and on my last morning I challenged myself, climbing with the advanced group in the red-rock wonderland of Snow Canyon State Park, about 10 miles northwest of St. George.

On the trail I talked with a pretty young guide about what it was like growing up in a Mormon community, and got friendly with one of the few male guests at the spa, a lawyer from the Bay Area who confided that he liked blackhead extractions with his facials. And gradually I came to realize that the reward for my efforts wasn’t the loss of a pound or a deep-tissue massage, but the walking itself in breathtakingly beautiful desert canyons.

Happily, the Green Valley food was something of a reward too: healthy, fresh and nicely presented, with dinners of sea bass or pork loin, eggs scrambled with red onions and bell peppers for breakfast, hearty minestrone for lunch. Seconds were always available, and in between meals so were all the apples, fiber-packed muffins and hard-boiled eggs you could want.

If you can ignore the bloating that inevitably results from a high-fiber, fat-restricted diet, your stomach will be happy at Green Valley. If you can’t, distract it with a spa treatment. I ran the gamut while I was there, from herbal wrap to full-body Canyonland Mudpack. I thought I should, for investigative purposes, you know.

But besides the hiking and a program called “body typing” (in which a trained consultant determines your genetic type and then advises you how to eat and exercise accordingly), beauty and relaxation treatments are what Green Valley excels in. So while I was there I was brushed with crushed pearl powder (made from ground up imperfect pearls) at the end of the mudpack, got so detoxified during the herbal wrap that three sips of coffee made me wired the next morning, and would have willingly signed over my 401K account to a masseur named Shaun after he rubbed almost every part of me, including my ears.

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After four days at Green Valley I moved 10 minutes north to the Red Mountain Spa, and it was a shock to my system.

To put it bluntly, Green Valley is a reward, Red Mountain is work. Not so much a spa as a total fitness vacation community (accommodating up to 220), every minute at Red Mountain is given over to exercise and health education. Though it’s often categorized as a fat farm (and most of the guests have more than a few pounds to shed), the goal isn’t just weight loss, but changing your life.

For this reason, shortly after arriving, you get a personal computer-generated health evaluation that gauges cardiovascular efficiency, strength, flexibility and body composition. I also signed up for an exceedingly useful weight management consultation ($35), which showed me precisely how to lose six pounds in two months, on 1,700 calories a day.

Red Mountain was started in 1974 as the National Institute of Fitness by Marc Sorenson, who wrote a bestseller, “Mega Health,” about the benefits of exercise combined with a severely fat- and sugar-restricted diet (about 1,250 calories a day, with no animal proteins like milk or meat). He sold the institute to the Franklin Quest time management company in 1994. In July it changed hands again: A Phoenix-based investment group bought out Franklin Quest, renaming the resort for the craggy peak that looms to the north, at the entrance of Snow Canyon State Park.

The setting is superb and the facilities excellent, with simply furnished guest rooms in two-story domed and Mediterranean-style buildings, lava rock waterfalls and flower beds planted with a pretty desert bloom called sacred datura. Aerobics classes are held in the fitness center. The cardiovascular dome has weight machines, treadmills, stationary bikes and a staff that goes to great pains to teach guests how to use them. Cafeteria-style meals are served in the Mega Health Building, also housing a lecture hall and salon. There are two big indoor pools for lap swimming and aqua-fitness classes.

The new owners plan to add an outdoor pool and spa treatment center. But I hope they don’t change too much at Red Mountain, or raise the price, because at $987 for seven days in a standard double (the price I paid in August, which included meals, accommodations, use of the facilities, classes and lectures), it’s one of the best fitness deals around. Regular folks come here--often yearly, some for a month and more--to get healthy, lose weight or avoid diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

I loved hearing their stories. One night at dinner I sat next to a 55-year-old woman who’d let herself go to seed after running the Paris marathon last spring.

You can eat all you want at mealtime--provided you’ve a taste for steamed vegetables, turkey burgers, plain white rice, oatmeal, salad and fruit. If you follow the spa’s diet guidelines you’ll keep your intake below 1,500 calories a day (with 12% to 15% of that from fat). And like a man from Berkeley I met there, in the morning you’ll remember crystal-clear dreams of chocolate chip cookies.

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You will lose weight. But it won’t be easy. After four days of hiking at Green Valley, I thought I was ready to join the B-plus hiking group at Red Mountain. The first morning at 6:30, I did an eight-mile hike in two hours. Along the path, I ate the dust of people who weighed 50 pounds more than me and were 20 years older. We passed Anasazi petroglyphs so quickly they seemed like road signs on a superhighway. When we finished, I was happy but exhausted, and ready for some complex-carbo-loading at breakfast.

I took exercise classes, too, taught not by wonder girls in thong leotards, but by women with real-life proportions. I went mountain biking, used the weight machines, had a massage and a few beauty treatments (nice, but hardly as hedonistic as those at Green Valley) and attended lectures. There I learned how to care for my feet and skin, and that strength training to build lean body mass promotes weight loss better than cardiovascular exertion like running.

In the end, I dropped 4 pounds, found the energy and motivation I needed to increase my weekly exercise routine, and came home with a diet plan I think I can follow. Of course, I still have my vices. But next time they start to get the better of me, I’m going back to southwestern Utah. Brigham Young was right about the region’s tonic qualities.

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GUIDEBOOK

Spa Utah!

Getting there: Skywest flies between LAX and St. George (change of planes in Salt Lake City; round-trip fares begin at $148. You can also fly from LAX to Las Vegas (on America West, Southwest, United, Reno Air, others), rent a car and drive to St. George (about 120 miles north on I-15), or arrange for van transportation directly to either spa with St. George Shuttle, telephone (800) 933-8320; round-trip rate is $40.

Utah spas: Green Valley Spa, 1871 W. Canyon View Drive, St. George, UT 84770; tel. (800) 237-1068 or (435) 628-8060, fax (435) 673-4084. It has a daily rate of $450 and a “seven-night value package” for $2,750, including five treatments. Currently, men pay half when accompanying women paying full price. Treatments range from $10 (10-minute aromatic bath) to $140 (100-minute body typing, or full-body mudpack).

Red Mountain Spa, 202 N. Snow Canyon Road, Ivins, UT 84738; tel. (800) 407-3002 or (435) 673-4905, fax (435) 673-1363. There are “quads” (four people sharing a room) for $795 to $985 per person, per week beginning Oct. 1. Doubles range from $1,095 to $1,335; private rooms from $1,595 to $1,795. (Prices drop after Nov. 22). Treatments cost from $15 (hair glossing) to $109 (100-minute body polish/massage); weight consultations, $35. Treatment and personal trainer packages also available.

For more information: Spa-Finders, 91 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10003, tel. (800) 255-7727 or (212) 924-6800, can arrange bookings at these and other spas.