Top 5 Saunas in the USA, According to Big Towel Founder Kelly Crimmins
Upstate-based founder of Big Towel Spa shares her favorite public saunas
This winter, we’re settling into a new rhythm at Escape Club: every other week, we ask someone with real experience and insight to share a quick “Top 5” from their world: design, hospitality, food, nature, and the quieter corners of culture that shape how we travel. It’s a chance to hear directly from people who genuinely live and breathe these spaces and experiences, and a small bonus for our paid subscribers.
We kicked off the series with Casey Scieszka — writer, innkeeper, and co-owner of Spruceton Inn — who shared her Top 5 motels across the U.S., drawing from years spent restoring, running, and reimagining one herself. The third installment featured a personal list from Erin Lindsey, founder of Escape Brooklyn: Top 5 Spa Resets I Took in 2025.
Most recently, Ari Heckman, co-founder and CEO of Ash Hotels, weighed in on the most underrated cities in the U.S., shaped by decades of building design-forward hotels in culturally rich, often overlooked places.
For this installment, we turned to Kelly Crimmins, founder of Big Towel Spa, to share her picks for the best saunas in the United States.
Top 5 Saunas in the USA, According to Big Towel Founder Kelly Crimmins
In the Hudson Valley, winter has a way of sharpening daily rituals. Cold air, frozen lakes, and shorter days turn heat into something essential — not indulgent — and public sauna culture has quietly found a foothold here as a result.
That’s the context in which Big Towel Spa emerged: a project rooted in the belief that saunas should be public, accessible, and communal, not locked behind luxury pricing or private memberships.
Founded by Hudson-based sauna enthusiast and longtime bather Kelly Crimmins, Big Towel operates wood-fired, mobile saunas that park in public spaces, most notably at Oakdale Beach in Hudson, NY and Palatine Park in Germantown, NY – where they are stationed until May. This week, Big Towel will announce an additional location in Kingston Point Beach with two new saunas.
There, winter sauna sessions unfold against a lakefront backdrop, drawing locals together around heat, cold plunges, and conversation. Affordable public pricing and a community-supported sweat fund ensure that no one is turned away for lack of funds, an approach inspired by the deeply social bathing cultures found throughout Northern Europe and beyond.
Kelly’s relationship to sauna began long before Big Towel. Early exposure to Korean spas in Los Angeles, combined with years of sauna travel and hands-on practice, shaped a perspective that’s equal parts reverent and practical. She approaches sauna not as spectacle, but as ritual: a liminal, grounding experience that demands care, respect, and good heat.
That lived experience makes her a natural voice for this list. Kelly’s picks span public institutions, community saunas, and deeply considered bathing spaces: places that honor tradition, get the details right, and understand that the best sauna experiences are as much about atmosphere and access as they are about temperature.
Below, Kelly shares her Top 5 Saunas in the U.S., from the Northeast to Southern California, offering an easy starting point for planning future travels, or for experiencing public sauna culture closer to home.
Happy sauna-ing,
— Erin + the EB team