Kelly Hot Spring
The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
Kelly Hot Spring, fifteen miles from Alturas in Modoc County, is a near-boiling source a short walk off a nameless road. Nobody is recorded as owner, and no access status was entered. The temperature alone settles the soaking question.
From the road it is a few hundred feet. The elevation is around forty-three hundred feet in the dry northeast, where a winter piles up about four feet of snow and total precipitation stays under twenty inches. No campground appears in the record for this one.
Winter is the season on file. Treat the water as a hazard; at this heat it scalds the instant it touches skin. Whose land this is has never been recorded, and neither has permission to visit. No fee is listed and no water sample was taken. There is no photograph. The temperature is the only measurement anyone took here.
USGS hasn't flown a detailed laser scan here yet, so this view comes from aerial photos and older elevation data.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 26 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northwest
A slice through the ground from northwest to southeast, about 0.6 miles end to end.
Elevation data: USGS 3D Elevation Program. Aerial imagery: USGS The National Map. Public domain.
Landsat's thermal camera passed over on a clear winter day, January 30, 2023. This spring's heat shows up from about 440 miles up. The brightest yellow marks the warmest ground, roughly 15°F warmer than the land around it.
Drag to compare. The view is about 2½ miles across, and each thermal pixel covers roughly 300 feet of ground, so individual pools blur into one warm patch.
Thermal: Landsat 8/9 surface temperature, USGS (public domain), via Microsoft Planetary Computer. Aerial: USGS The National Map. More springs seen from space.
That's about 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 31% 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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