Warm Sulphur Springs
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
Out in the desert of San Bernardino County, Warm Sulphur Springs is a BLM spring that the Ridgecrest Field Office administers. Searles Valley is the closest town and it is a good twenty-six miles away. The water is tepid, bathwater gone cool. Access is open. The USGS keeps a site record for it, which tells you it is a catalogued thermal point. Nothing in the file says anything about pools or development.
Indian Ranch Road comes within about a tenth of a mile, so there is a short walk at the end and that is all. This is low desert, around a thousand feet up, and the climate numbers are severe: a hot yearly average and hardly any rain. Snow shows up as a trace on paper. Public land under the Bureau of Land Management, with no designation beyond that.
Winter is the window. December through February are the months on record, and given the summer heat out here that makes sense. Short walk from the road. No campground is listed nearby and no fee is on file. Nobody has logged a water sample, so the chemistry is unknown; the name alone suggests sulphur.
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 Warm Sulphur Springs.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the east.
- Highest ground nearby
- 118 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 about 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 61% 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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Warm Sulphur Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. Bring sun protection for exposed soaking.
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