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.
About a dozen miles from Alturas, an unnamed thermal point sits a few hundred feet off California Pines Boulevard in Modoc County. Water temperature on record is 81 degrees, lukewarm. Nobody has recorded an owner for the ground or a public access status. No campground is listed within reach, and no photograph exists on file.
California Pines Boulevard is the road on record, with the spring under five hundred feet from it, a short walk. Elevation is about forty-five hundred feet. Snow averages four feet each winter and the yearly precipitation total is around nineteen inches, a dry climate with cold winters and a mean temperature near fifty.
The three coldest months are the ones on record. Expect snow on the approach. There is no campground on file, so plan to day-trip or camp elsewhere. Ownership and access are unknown; ask locally. No fee recorded. Eighty-one degrees feels warm on a freezing day and little else.
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 west.
- Highest ground nearby
- 194 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the west
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 38% 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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