Tahoe is a place to relax, unwind, enjoy the outdoors, and recharge. And it’s a hot bed (sometimes literally) of holistic healing and rejuvenation, thanks to its vibrant cerulean alpine lake and natural environment. 

Athletes also come to Tahoe to train for a race or recover from one and adjust to Tahoe’s high altitude mountain environment. While there are many yoga studios, massage spas, reiki, and acupuncture services available to help keep people fresh, energized, and relaxed on their Tahoe vacation, these three alternative wellness businesses take unconventional therapy to the next level:

Tahoe Forest Baths, Stateline

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https://tahoeforestbaths.com

Opening in May of 2023, Tahoe Forest Baths is the brainchild of Tahoe residents Timothy Walter and Candice Raynor, who also owns an aesthetics medical spa next door. Shortly after Walter and Raynor met (amid the Caldor Fire), they ended up at the Osmosis Day Spa Sanctuary in Bodega Bay, taking cedar enzyme baths together. It was the only place in North America that offered cedar baths. 

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“She thought that Tahoe needed something like this,” he said. As their relationship progressed, Walter agreed to go in on opening their own enzyme cedar bath spa. 

Enzyme cedar baths are popular in Japan, and the Tahoe Forest Baths founders reached out to the Ohtaka Enzyme Co., a business that’s been doing fermented sawdust baths for more than 100 years. Walter and Raynor went out to the Hokkaido region of Japan in the summer of 2022, meeting their lab technicians, visiting different baths, and going to the gardens where the 50 or so plant extracts are grown. 

They came home, remodeled the space to fit two big wooden tubs, showers, and a resting room, and opened Tahoe Forest Baths at Stateline. 

A special enzyme solution is used to ferment the baths, the sweet warming fluid mixed in with the cedar dust and a bit of rice bran to create a natural heat source. Since the baths are heated strictly by the energy of the cedar reacting with the enzyme solution, they can get up to 140-150 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s like being in a natural hot spring…it’s common to go into a meditative state and feel like you’re being hugged by nature. 

When you simply run your fingers through the sawdust, steam comes up. It gets hotter the deeper you go, and after 20 minutes your body usually encourages you to get out. Twenty minutes is enough time to get your heart rate up, and possibly kill any cancer cells. 

There are a ton of health benefits associated with cedar baths, such as it being cleansing, causing clear mindedness, restores balance, and invokes feelings of peace, calm, sereneness. “And then you have optimal energy the rest of the day,” Walter says. “It causes a shift in your body to be what it should naturally feel like.”

Local Olympic athletes have visited Tahoe Forest Baths or people simply looking for a unique spa experience while on vacation. 

“It’s a way to tune out…it’s for couples, people going through challenges and the stresses of real life. Moms who are busy with kids come in here when they need a moment to themselves,” Walter adds. 

Taking a forest bath helps with circulatory issues, it’s a passive cardio treatment that provides optimal blood flow. It creates a serotonin boost, aides in hormone regulation. The energy generated from the baths penetrates the core and stimulates internal organs. 

Then people come out of the tub and sluff off the excess cedar onto the floor, like blotting paper, which doubly acts like a skin exfoliant. 

“You will feel as loose and light on your feet like getting a full body massage,” Walter says, and you can feel the benefits of taking a cedar bath up to a week after. 

The cedar shavings they use are hypoallergenic, rot resistant, antifungal, and antibacterial. Walter says that they change out the cedar every week but not any more than that because the shavings need to stay active, like maintaining a sourdough starter. However, new cedar is added every day, and is replenished every week. It’s a couple of cubic yards of cedar per tub, which is why they have two “double” or merged tubs. 

Plus, this is the only Ohtaka-appointed fermented coniferous sawdust bath spa available in North America. 

“Tourists are embracing this,” Walter says. “Coming here is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing”.  

Go2 Aroma Oxygen Bar, Incline Village

https://www.oxygenbartahoe.com

Nestled between a liquor store, a coworking space, and a dispensary a half-a-block down in Incline Village, the Go2 Aroma Oxygen Bar is the place to go to recover from a big night out or if you simply need to get your body acclimated to the high and dry environment. 

The idea to open an oxygen bar came about when Virginia “Ginger” Jordan’s son Ben went to school at Sierra Nevada College (now called UNR at Lake Tahoe). He studied English and engineering, but also took an entrepreneurship class where he had to come up with a business plan. He realized that taking oxygen could increase energy and athletic performance, as well as help with altitude sickness. When combining air with essential oils, people could also breathe in oxygen to help cure hangovers, the flu, anxiety, sinus conditions, and long-term covid. 

The Go2 Aroma Oxygen Bar launched in 2018, and Virginia told her son that she would help him run it in its first year. But then covid hit and the bar was closed for two years because of it. When Go2 reopened, though, they found that they had a new breed of customers—covid long haulers. When smoke infiltrated the Tahoe basin during the Caldor Fire, Go2 also gave out free oxygen to first responders. 

On a Friday afternoon Lisa Poley and her son-in-law James Pevy had just walked into the oxygen bar. Poley was visiting from Michigan and staying at the Hyatt Regency Lake Tahoe for a few days when altitude sickness got to her. 

“It really beats going to the ER,” Poley says about coming to Go2. Her oxygen was in the eighties when she walked in, which is low (it should be at least 92). After 10 minutes of being on the machine (or breathing in air through a nose hose), her oxygen level was back up to 96. Her heart rate was over 100, too, which was not good, but it had settled down to 85. 

Up to eight people can get on an oxygen machine, and even just a 10-minute session makes a significant difference in how your body feels. Virginia says that the oxygen stays in your body for 4-6 hours after a 20-minute session, and a 45-minute session can last a few days. “You sleep really good, and it can last into the next day,” she adds. 

Oxygenbars.com is Go2’s supplier and they hold a commercial lease on the machines. The oxygen machines are portable, and the Jordan family can easily set up the bar at weddings, sporting events, tradeshows, business meetings, bachelor/bachelorette parties…pretty much wherever they are needed. 

People who’ve had too much fun on the lake the day before will come in to recover, or after a night of partying. Mountain climbers will take oxygen to help them acclimatize, and softball players or triathletes will visit to get extra energy for a race or a tournament. 

“We do a lot of parties on the weekends, and we did a tradeshow at the Hard Rock last fall and now a lot of people from South Lake Tahoe come in here,” Virginia says. “We do girls’ nights, birthday parties. Our location between the dispensary and liquor store draws people in,” she adds. 

She can set up the bar outside on nice days, and she also sells energy and recovery oxygen cans. 

Poley wore an o2 saturation and heart rate finger monitor, and after a 20-minute session she had color in her cheeks and her eyes were brighter. “This is amazing,” she said. 

Lost Sauna Co, Carnelian Bay

Rooted in Finnish tradition, saunas are rooms that are filled with steam and lots of heat to make its inhabitants sweat. Evidence has shown that using a sauna regularly can help boost immunity, strengthen one’s cardiovascular and respiratory system, melt away stress, relax muscles, and even alleviate depression. 

Saunas are not a new concept, and a few of them can be found at gyms and wellness spas throughout Tahoe. However, Lost Sauna Co is unique in that the sauna comes to you so that you don’t have to go looking for one. 

It all started when lifelong friends Tony Marchetti and Trevor Samsa grew up around saunas in Minnesota and moved out to North Lake Tahoe to be in the mountains. Samsa had worked in commercial real estate and Marchetti worked in building trades, and they thought about how they could combine their skillsets to create something that would improve people’s quality of life. They brought up the idea of building custom saunas but taking it one step further by making it mobile. Marchetti and Samsa built their first sauna on wheels in their Kings Beach driveway before moving to Carnelian Bay where they built the second one, and then they started renting them out under the name Lost Sauna Co.

Marchetti oversees the design and construction of the saunas while Samsa manages the bookings and marketing. Marchetti says that it took about three months to build one of the saunas. Each one holds 6-8 people, but sometimes 10 can fit. Most often, people rent the saunas to use in their driveways, and/or Airbnb’s. 

A two-hour sauna rental is $300, and a nightly rental is $400, so most people keep the saunas overnight (a three-night rental is $1,000). A cold plunge tub is available in the warmer months for an added $50.

The owners can deliver saunas to the lake, but it will cost a little more since the company has to pay a commission to set up a sauna in a public space. Waterman’s Landing and the Tahoe Vista Recreation Area are a few spots right on the water where people can use Lake Tahoe as a cold plunge.

They deliver saunas from Incline Village to Tahoma and Truckee, consistently at all places, and have delivered to Reno on a couple of occasions, too. 

The busiest time is the winter holidays, but really “anything that brings people to Tahoe we have a spike in rentals,” Marchetti adds. 

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the Summer 2024 edition of Tahoe Magazine.