Iridat 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.
Iridat Spring is a warm seep in Merced County, twenty miles out from Los Banos, at low elevation. The water is tepid, a bit above seventy, nothing you would soak in. Landowner and access status are both blank.
Roadside, two hundred feet off an unnamed road. It sits around twelve hundred feet in dry country: eleven inches of precipitation most years, no snow ever. There is no campground in the record for it. Nothing on file says how the water surfaces or what, if anything, collects it.
Winter months are listed as best. Nothing on file establishes who owns the land or if you can visit. Chemistry and photograph are absent. Nothing on fees.
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 Iridat Spring.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the west.
- Highest ground nearby
- 429 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the west
A slice through the ground from west to east, 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 17% 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.