Coso Hot Springs
Inside Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, a long way out from Inyokern, Coso Hot Springs is a cluster of vents and pools. It is closed. The water comes out scalding, hot enough to cook skin on contact, and a 1964 sample put the pH down near 1.5, which is extremely acidic. This is a listed historic site on a military base, and you cannot visit it.
Desert at a little over four thousand feet on record, inside the fence of a Navy weapons range. Almost no rain. A little snow some winters. A road passes within a few hundred feet of the springs. That road is on the base, and the base is off limits. Chimney Creek Campground, the closest camping on file, is a long drive off.
There is no season for this one because there is no access. The land designation is military and public access is recorded as closed. The water is far above scalding and acidic on top of that. If the place interests you, the interest is historical. Treat the chemistry numbers as sixty year old readings.
The springs are on the National Register of Historic Places. Wikipedia puts them on record of the Mojave Desert, in Inyo County, and the USGS carries a sampling record for them that goes back to 1964. The whole complex now sits inside Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake.
USGS hasn't flown a detailed laser scan here yet, so this view comes from aerial photos and older elevation data.
The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 86 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 twice the US average of 65. It's higher than at 68% 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.
The water at Coso Hot Springs is strongly acidic (pH 1.5) with 2500 mg/L total dissolved solids. It is notably rich in magnesium (known for muscle relaxation and stress relief), sulfate (traditionally used for skin conditions and inflammation), and iron (iron-rich springs may support circulation).
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Chimney Creek Campground is located within Chimney Peak Recreation Area and is cherry stemmed out of Owens Peak Wilderness. The campground contains 36 sites and is nestled among beautiful pinyon pines, grey pines, and oaks along Chimney Creek at 5,700 feet in elevation. Each site in the campground has a picnic table and fire ring. Potable water is available during the summer months near the very end of the campground loop at site 36. During the summer, days can be warm and dry. The Pacific C...
Coso Hot Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. The water is dangerously hot, so bring water shoes and test pools carefully.
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