Pothole 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.
Thirty miles from Alturas in Modoc County, Pothole Spring is a tepid spring reached by a walk of under a mile from Clear Lake Reservoir Road. The water is warm to the touch and no more. The record is silent on ownership and on access, and no campground is listed within reach. At nearly five thousand feet this is high, cold country.
High plateau country, cold for much of the year. Winters bring better than four feet of snow. The approach is most of a mile on foot from Clear Lake Reservoir Road. No land unit is recorded and no designation. Rain is moderate, and a good share of the year's moisture arrives as snow.
Best months on file fall in the dead of winter, which sits oddly against four feet of snow a year; check road conditions on Clear Lake Reservoir Road before you commit. No fee is listed, and neither is an owner or an access status. Camping is not on file nearby. Alturas, thirty miles off, is the nearest town.
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 Pothole Spring.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 59 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northeast
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 about 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 56% 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.