June 9, 2026
Contrast Therapy Does Not Stop in Summer. It Gets Better
People assume the sauna is a winter habit. Ask anyone who rides or runs here through July and they’ll tell you the opposite.
It’s an easy assumption to make. A cedar sauna at 198°F sounds like something you want in February, when the parking lot is ice and you’ve lost feeling in two toes. By June, with the sun up past nine and the trails finally dry, sitting in a hot room sounds like the last thing anyone needs.
But summer in Park City is not a rest season. It’s the season people ride until dark, run the ridge before work, and stack three big days back to back because the window is short and everyone knows it. That’s exactly when a recovery habit stops being a luxury and starts being the thing that lets you keep going.
Here’s what changes about the ritual when the snow is gone.
1. In summer, the plunge is the main event
The order flips
In winter, most people come for the heat. The plunge is the brave part at the end, the thing you talk about afterward. In summer that reverses. You arrive already warm, already tired, legs full from a climb, and the 50°F water is the thing you’re actually here for.
The sauna still matters, but its job changes. It becomes the thing that makes the cold work: heat first so the vessels open, then cold so they close hard, then repeat. Skip the heat and a cold tub is just a cold tub. Keep it and you get the full cycle, which is what makes the difference you feel the next morning rather than just the next ten minutes.
2. Heat is training too
Getting comfortable being hot
Anyone who has raced or ridden hard in July knows the feeling of the day getting away from them, not because their legs gave out but because they overheated. Heat is its own limiter, separate from fitness.
Spending regular time in the sauna is one of the few ways to work on that directly, without adding another hard session to a week that’s already full. You’re asking your body to sit calmly in conditions it finds uncomfortable and to handle it better each time. That’s a skill, and like most skills it responds to repetition more than intensity. Twenty unhurried minutes a few times a week does more than one heroic session that leaves you wrecked.
It stacks well with altitude, too. We’re at 6,500 feet, and most visitors arrive from a lot closer to sea level. Easing into heat is a gentler adaptation than most people expect, and it doesn’t cost you a training day.
3. Legs, between the big days
What you notice on day three
One long ride is fine. Three in a row is where the summer actually gets decided. That’s where the heat and cold cycle earns its place: not by fixing one bad day, but by keeping the third day from being noticeably worse than the first.
The mechanism is unglamorous. Heat opens circulation, cold drives it back, and cycling between them moves blood through tired tissue far more than lying on the couch does. Our regulars mostly describe it in plain terms rather than physiological ones. Their legs feel less heavy. Stairs are less of an event. They stop dreading the morning after.
4. Sleep, when it’s light until nine
Giving the day an ending
Long daylight is the best thing about a mountain summer and the worst thing about mountain sleep. It stays bright, it stays warm, and your body never quite gets the signal that the day is over.
A late-afternoon session gives it one. The plunge drops your core temperature, and the drift back to normal over the following hour is the same downward slope your body uses to fall asleep. Plenty of people tell us their best sleep of the summer follows a 4:30 session. It’s not a cure for anything, but it’s a reliable full stop at the end of a day that otherwise doesn’t have one.
None of this requires a plan. Come after a ride, sit in the heat until you’ve stopped thinking about the climb, get in the 50°F, and repeat it two or three times. If you want the harder version, the second plunge sits at 40°F. Towels, water, electrolytes and tea are all here, so you can turn up straight off the trail with nothing but yourself.
Summer hours run Monday to Friday, 10a–2p and 4–8p, and 9a–7p on weekends — which means there’s a slot before the day starts and one after it ends. If it becomes a habit, the Avanto Pass at $119/mo covers unlimited sessions and includes a buddy pass each month, which is how most people end up bringing whoever they rode with.
Ride hard, then undo some of it. The heat and the cold are waiting at Kimball Junction.
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