Spring (Hot)
A thermal spring in Sequoia National Forest, logged on the record only as Spring (Hot), about ten miles out of Bodfish in Kern County. No temperature reading exists for it, so nobody can tell you from what is on file how warm it runs or if anyone sits in it. The land is Forest Service and access is listed as open.
China Garden Road gets you within a few hundred yards. The rest is on foot, a short walk by the record's classification. The spring sits low for the southern Sierra, around two thousand feet, where the year averages in the mid sixties and rain totals stay lean. Winters drop a little snow, under a foot in a typical year.
Open public access on national forest land, and no fee shows on file. Oak Flat Lookout campground sits roughly three miles away if you want to stay the night. Carry a thermometer, because the record has no temperature and no best season listed. Check the water before you commit to it.
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 Spring (Hot).
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
- Setting
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 252 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the east
A slice through the ground from west to east, 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 9% 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 The Oak Flat Lookout sits the Greenhorn Mountains in the Sequoia National Forest and Sequoia National Monument, about an hour from Bakersfield, California. Perched at an elevation of 4,900 feet, the tower overlooks the scenic Kern River and Kern River Valley and has panoramic views of the mountains, river and valley. Oak Flat Lookout was constructed in 1934 to provide fire detection views along the Kern River Canyon. In the early years of the Forest Service, lookouts provided a cru...
Spring (Hot) is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
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