West Valley Reservoir Hot 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.
West Valley Reservoir Hot Spring comes up scalding in Modoc County, some twenty-two miles from Alturas. The water is far too hot to touch where it surfaces. Public access is blank in the record and no land owner is named, so it reads as a surveyed thermal point. No one has recorded a pool or a soak here, and the temperature alone says you would not want one at the source.
The nearest road is under a mile away and carries no name in the record, so count on a walk of a bit under a mile each way over unrecorded ground. Elevation is around forty-eight hundred feet, high country. Winter is the real thing up here; the snow total tops five feet, with fair rain the rest of the year. No land unit or owner is recorded.
The record shows December through February as best, odd for a place with that much snow; check road conditions before relying on it. The walk in is a little under a mile. Patterson Guard Station, roughly ten miles out, is the camping on file. The water will burn you. Test with a thermometer or a quick splash before any skin goes in. Who owns the land, and if the public is welcome, is not in the record.
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 West Valley Reservoir Hot Spring.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the southeast.
- Highest ground nearby
- 113 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southeast
A slice through the ground from northwest to southeast, 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 27% 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 *Altitude is 7,080 feet above sea level* Set on the edge of a meadow surrounded by Aspen, Fir and Pine trees, Patterson Guard Station has stood since 1921. It served the Modoc National Forest as a fully staffed fire office and guard station until 1981. Just a few footsteps from the Summit Trail and one-quarter mile from the wilderness boundary, Patterson Guard Station can be your basecamp for trips into the South Warner Wilderness or the perfect place to disconnect and relax. The...
West Valley Reservoir Hot Spring is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. The water is dangerously hot, so bring water shoes and test pools carefully.
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