Unnamed Thermal Spring
The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
Unnamed on the record, this thermal point sits within the Fort Apache Reservation, in Gila County, about twelve miles from Canyon Day. Warm water, tepid to the hand, nothing you would call hot. A road with no name on file passes under half a mile away. Access is unknown, which on tribal land means ask first.
Over 4,300 feet. Winters here are snowier than most Arizona spring sites, about fourteen inches, with fifteen of rain. No road name is recorded, and no landowner beyond the reservation. Timber Camp Recreation Area, twenty miles away, is the only campground listed. The climate average sits in the low sixties, cool for the state.
Permission from the reservation is the first step. The best time, per the record, is winter, though fourteen inches of snow could make the approach messy then. Camping is twenty miles off at Timber Camp. Temperature is the lone measurement. There is no chemistry on record, no USGS number, and no photo, so you would be going in on coordinates and a single reading.
USGS hasn't flown a detailed laser scan here yet, so this view comes from aerial photos and older elevation data.
- Setting
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 266 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southwest
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 20% 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.
Overview Timber Camp Recreation Area has one of the most popular family and group campgrounds in the Tonto National Forest offering both day-use sites and over-night areas.Recreation Abundant recreation opportunities such as cross-country horseback riding, hiking, in-season hunting, exploring, off-highway vehicle use and wildlife viewing are in close proximity. In the spring, whitewater rafting trips on the Upper Salt River launch a mere 20-minute drive from the site. Brundrett 2 and the equ...
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