Fairview Hot Spring
Fairview Hot Spring marks the place where a resort once stood in what is now Costa Mesa, in Orange County, a few dozen feet from Bowdoin Place. The temperature on file is body warm. The water that made the resort's name came from a well, per Wikipedia, heated artesian water mixed with natural gas. What is there to see or use today is not in our data, and access is unrecorded.
Flat suburban Orange County, barely above sea level, a short distance from the street. Rain is light, around ten inches a year, and snow is unheard of. Our records show no campground for this one. Ownership of the site is blank. Nothing in the row describes what kind of ground this is now.
Weather is mild all year; the record lists winter as best. Roadside. No fee, no camping, no access information, which for a historic hotel site in a built up area means doing some homework before you go looking for a pool. Our data does not say if warm water still reaches the surface.
Wikipedia says Fairview Hot Springs ran as a resort hotel from about 1887 to about 1918 in the town of Fairview, now Costa Mesa. The hot springs were a well that produced heated artesian water along with natural gas, and the place was known for mudbaths. The development was already languishing by the late 1910s, and Wikipedia credits its end to either financial failure or the 1918 San Jacinto earthquake.
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 Fairview Hot 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
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 4 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southeast
A slice through the ground from north to south, 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 7% 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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