Yep. Utah. Where the state bird is the sea gull. Where the Bonneville Salt Flats host the world's fastest land vehicles, and Park City hosts Hollywood's finest who mingle on the frozen slopes with some of the globe's preeminent snow shredders. That famous dive destination of Utah. In all honesty, divers from Colorado and Idaho come by the hundreds every weekend to a place called the Crater to earn their PADI Open Water certifications. And they come in the dead cold dark of winter.

Why?

Because the crater is a 96°F, 65-foot-deep geothermal pool, with 40-50 feet of viz. It's covered by a beehive-shaped dome that lets delicate, even cute (did I say that??!!) flakes of snow flutter in to ride a shaft of light down to this natural hot tub. It's definitely one of the coolest dives on the planet. It's like taking an extended, fully immersed spa treatment. The water is ever so slightly effervescent, and after your dive your skin will never feel more clean or tingly (egads! Did I say that, too?). And despite it being a steamy hole in the ground, there's plenty to see, do and even explore. Since divers come from miles around to learn to dive, there's a platform at 20 feet. Suspended from the bottom you'll find an old wagon wheel, along with a buoyancy course to hone your skills. It seems settlers who passed through on their way west used the Crater as a prairie dumpster. The nearby Homestead Resort and Spa has a small museum with all sorts of rifles, coins, bottles, pistols, boots, tin cups and other westward-ho paraphernalia discarded by people who lived in a less environmentally conscious time. The bottom is still littered with treasures, and because water is continuously upwelling, new finds pop up all the time; please leave them for the archeologists. They ask you to limit your dives to 45 feet to keep from kicking up silt, but it does clear up fairly quickly with the exchange, and a quick look at the bottom is a must (mind your buoyancy!). The fine silt gurgles, roils and boils like primordial ooze as mineral-laden water percolates up from the molten center of the Earth.

There's also a top-notch dive shop right in the Crater, and the nearby Homestead Resort & Spa is a central Utah gem with great rooms and a dinner menu that will leave you feeling like Buddha on a binge. It's an altitude dive, so you'll have to adjust your computers to compensate. It's about 30 minutes from Park City and 45 from Salt Lake City. Where else can you ski, soak, snowmobile, ride horses through the mountains and scuba dive all in one day? For information, check out www.homestead-ut.com.