Unnamed Thermal 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.
An unnamed thermal point on BLM land in Fresno County, about twenty miles from Firebaugh. The water is tepid, mid-seventies. The Bureau of Land Management's Central Coast Field Office manages the ground and has it down as open. Getting to it takes a walk of a bit under a mile from where the road ends.
Dry low country, under a thousand feet. Ten inches of rain in a typical year, and snow never figures into it. The walk in runs a shade under three quarters of a mile, on a road that goes unnamed. BLM public land with no further designation. Nothing is listed for camping near this point, and Firebaugh is twenty miles off.
The listed season is December through February, and with no snow the approach is open all year. Short walk in. No camping on file, no fee recorded. Open public land means you can go, but with the water only tepid this is mostly for people who like ticking off obscure thermal sites.
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 this spring.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the southwest.
- Highest ground nearby
- 182 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southwest
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 17% 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.