Mclear Warm Springs
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
McLear Warm Springs lies in the pine country of Plumas County, not far from Portola. The water is warm, in the range where you notice it on your skin but would not call it a bath. The record has no owner or land unit for it. Public entry goes unmentioned. What is on file is a short walk from a road and a climate that buries the area in snow most winters.
Six hundred feet or so from the nearest road, which goes unnamed here. The elevation is mid-mountain, above four and a half thousand feet. Winters are serious. Snowfall averages well over a hundred inches, and with thirty-some inches of precipitation a year this is wet country by California standards. The annual average of about fifty degrees hides the cold half of the year.
The record lists December through February as the best months, which is odd for a place with this much snow, so weigh that against the snowfall figure and check road conditions. Calpine Lookout campground is about six miles away. Nothing on file says who owns the spring or if you may enter. The water is warm only, a fair-weather dip.
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 Mclear Warm Springs.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the east.
- Highest ground nearby
- 84 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the east
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.
That's about twice the US average of 65. It's higher than at 75% 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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Overview Calpine is a forest fire lookout tower that was constructed in 1934 by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and is one of three remaining examples of the enclosed windmill-style lookout in California. The lookout was actively used every summer until 1975. It is a three-story structure with external stairs. The top room or observation cab is the only rentable space at this time. This is a popular rental facility that is booked almost every night of the year. Calpine sits at an elev...
Mclear Warm Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
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