Agua Tibia 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.
Agua Tibia Spring, in San Diego County near the community of Rainbow, is a soaking-warm spring, low nineties, a few hundred feet from a road at a little over a thousand feet of elevation. Nobody is listed as owner, and public access is unknown, so the temperature is the one thing in its favor until that is settled. Rainbow is about eight miles away.
The road is unnamed, and the spring sits a few hundred feet from it at low elevation in San Diego County, where snow is essentially unheard of and annual rain is about seventeen inches. The land owner and land unit are blank in the record, which leaves the character of the place to your own eyes. No fee and no bath structure appear in the record.
The months that rate best are December through February, with no snow to worry about. Dripping Springs Campground is under eight miles away, the one camping option on record. Access goes unrecorded; confirm ownership before visiting. Comfortable for sitting in on a winter day, the water poses no burn risk.
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 Agua Tibia Spring.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the northeast.
- Highest ground nearby
- 269 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northeast
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 close to the US average of 65. It's higher than at 15% 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 Dripping Springs campground is a wonderful campground adjacent to the Agua Tibia Wilderness.Recreation Recreation in the area includes hiking, trail running, and backpacking.Facilities The campground facilities include restrooms and potable water. No showers or other amenities are available at this location.Natural Features The campground is adjacent to sensitive riparian habitat which is home to the endangered Arroyo Toad. The hills surrounding the campground are covered in southern...
Agua Tibia Spring is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
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