Outside Magazine Names Best New Eco-Getaways

Filed in archive Adventure on March 31, 2008

Let's face it. Green is in. As people continue to grow more conscious about the environment, more and more aspects of our life will be "green". And travel isn't excluded. If you're passionate about the environment, consider taking an eco-getaway, recommended by the editors of Outside magazine in their March 2008 issue.

The Lodge at Sun Ranch, in Cameron, Mont., which is notable among eco-resorts for allowing hunting of free-range organic elk; $900 a person for three nights, http://www.sunranchlodge.com. Outside says the ranch plants 10 trees in the Amazon for every guest.

-Proximity Hotel, Greensboro, N.C., a new hotel striving for top certification from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design code, a nationally recognized benchmark for green buildings. Solar panels heat 60 percent of the hotel's water, and its elevator captures electricity produced by the brakes as the car descends; doubles from $199, http://www.proximityhotel.com

-Orchard Garden Hotel, San Francisco, which was built from concrete made from fly ash, a byproduct of coal power plants, with key cards that turn off the heat when you leave the room; doubles from $190, http://www.theorchardgardenhotel.com/.

-gaia Napa Valley Hotel and Spa, the only LEED gold-certified hotel in the U.S., where a copy of Al Gore's eco-manifest "An Inconvenient Truth" is kept in every room along with the Holy Bible and a Buddhist bible; doubles from $160; http://www.gaianapavalleyhotel.com.