Barrons 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.
Barrons Hot Spring is scalding. Water at the source comes out far past anything a body can enter, in Camas County, Idaho, about seven miles from Fairfield. A short walk covers the gap from the road. Neither owner nor access status appears on the record, so the legal side is unknown.
Around five thousand feet, in a dry part of the state with sixteen inches of precipitation and about four and a half feet of snow each winter. The walk from the nearest road is under five hundred feet; the road itself is nameless in the record. Bowns Campground, the nearest camping, is almost twenty-two miles away. No land unit is recorded.
Do not get in. The source temperature will burn skin on contact, and no cooled pool is described in the record. December, January and February are the months the record lists as best. The walk is short. Access is not confirmed as public, and the chemistry dates from a 1989 sample.
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 Barrons Hot Spring.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 21 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the south
A slice through the ground from south to north, 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 65% 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.
The water at Barrons Hot Spring is slightly alkaline (pH 8.0) with 337 mg/L total dissolved solids.
Bowns Campground, located 25 miles east of Featherville and 18 miles north of Fairfield, is a developed campground composed of 10 units along Big Smoky Creek. Two of the camp sites are double family units. Camping, fishing, hiking, and picnicking are popular activities. Campground amenities include picnic tables, fire rings, drinking water (seasonally) and restrooms. Miller Creek Trail (#087) starts just south of the campground and is open to motorcycles.
Springs Near Barrons Hot Spring
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Slightly Alkaline Springs (pH ~8.0)
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