Sheep Creek 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.
BLM land in the San Bernardino County desert holds Sheep Creek Spring, a tepid spring roughly thirty miles from Fort Irwin, the nearest town on file. The Barstow Field Office manages it and entry is open. The spring is within five hundred feet of Sheep Creek Spring Road, signed D233 in the record. The water is barely warm, cooler than a bath.
Low Mojave desert, rain scarce and snow absent. Public land, no fee on record. The walk from Sheep Creek Spring Road is short. A 1967 water sample is on file showing a mildly alkaline pH and moderate dissolved solids, with calcium, sodium, sulfate and chloride among the minerals measured, plus magnesium and iron.
Go in winter. There is no camping on record anywhere close. Entry is open, no fee. The chemistry on record is from a survey in early 1967, decades old, so the figures shown here are a snapshot from then. Burns are not a concern at this temperature.
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 Sheep Creek Spring.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the southeast.
- Highest ground nearby
- 494 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southeast
A slice through the ground from north to south, 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.
The water at Sheep Creek Spring is slightly alkaline (pH 7.9) with 801 mg/L total dissolved solids. It is notably rich in magnesium (known for muscle relaxation and stress relief) and sulfate (traditionally used for skin conditions and inflammation).