Little 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.
Little Hot Spring, in Shasta County, is scalding. It lies nearly thirty miles from Burney and a short walk from Forest Route 40N01. Nothing on file says who owns the ground, and public access is unrecorded. Nothing describes a pool or any use of the water, either; the record is a temperature, a location, a road and a climate.
Forest Route 40N01 runs about three tenths of a mile from the spring. The spring lies at about thirty-five hundred feet, where snow reaches almost five feet over a winter and twenty-seven inches of precipitation fall in a year. Pit River Campground, seventeen miles off, is the nearest on record.
The record points to midwinter. Keep away from the water. Anything it touches gets scalded. With no owner recorded and no access status, check before you go. The record holds no fee and no chemistry. Nobody photographed it. The only name attached to the access is the forest route number.
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 Little Hot Spring.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the east.
- Highest ground nearby
- 120 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the east
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 16% 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 Pit River Recreation area is adjacent to the Pit River, has a small campground with eight campsites with tables, metal firerings, and barbeque pits. Amenities include: two single wheelchair accessible restrooms, a kayak launch ramp, and an accessible fishing pier. Camping:$8.00/night
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