Lewis Spring
Lewis Spring is a barely warm spring inside Leslie Canyon National Wildlife Refuge in Cochise County, sixteen miles or so from Pirtleville. The water is cool enough that you would not call it a soak, and the land is a federal refuge where access is listed as restricted. The US Fish and Wildlife Service manages the ground.
Leslie Canyon Road passes close by, and the approach is a short walk, though restricted access on refuge land means that walk may be off limits. The spring sits near five thousand feet in a dry part of Cochise County that sees almost no snow and about a foot of rain in a year. The record lists no fee and shows nothing built at the water.
Ask the refuge before going; the record says restricted, and that outranks everything else on this page. Winter months rate best, and with a couple of inches of snow each winter the weather is seldom the obstacle. Nobody is soaking in water this cool anyway. Camp Rucker group site is the campground on the record, fourteen miles out.
Aircraft with laser scanners measured this ground to within inches. The scan strips out trees and buildings, leaving the bare shape of the land around Lewis Spring.
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
- Setting
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 454 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the north
A slice through the ground from southwest to northeast, about 0.6 miles end to end.
Elevation data: USGS 3D Elevation Program. Aerial imagery: USGS The National Map. Public domain.
That's about 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 22% of the springs on this site.
Heat flow measures the warmth working its way up through the ground from deep inside the earth. Where it runs high, rain and snowmelt that seep down through cracks in the rock come back up hot.
See every spring on the geothermal heat map →
Heat flow estimate: Stanford Thermal Earth Model (Aljubran & Horne, 2024), CC BY 4.0.
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Overview The Camp Rucker Group Site is not available for reservations at this time for site re-design and facility improvements. The group camp area is now open to individual party walk-in camping. Individual sites are $15 per night; cash payment on-site. Camp Rucker sits in the beautiful and remote Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona. Recreation The Rucker and Tex Canyon scenic drive takes visitors over the southern reaches of the Chiricahua Mountains through beautiful canyon co...
Lewis Spring is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
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