Bear Valley 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.
Bear Valley Hot Spring lies in the Boise National Forest, Valley County, Idaho, forty miles from Cascade. The record tags it warm and gives no temperature, so no soak can be promised. What is on file is a 1979 sample with a very alkaline pH. Access is open. You hike in, about two and a half miles beyond the nearest road.
High, over six thousand feet, and buried in winter: the snow total is near fifteen feet. Average temperature is cold. Rain and snow together make this a wet part of the state by inches. The approach is a two-and-a-half-mile hike on Forest Service land. Banner Creek Campground is six or seven miles away by the record.
There is no season ranking to give, since the temperature was never measured. Fifteen feet of snow means the hike will be snowbound much of the year. Banner Creek is the listed campground. The only chemistry is a 1979 sample, strongly alkaline. Do not plan around a warm soak.
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 Bear Valley Hot Spring.
- Setting
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 663 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the north
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 twice the US average of 65. It's higher than at 68% 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 Bear Valley Hot Spring is alkaline (pH 9.5).
A nice campground along Highway 21 in the trees with a small creek running through. Campground has 5 campsites with picnic tables and fire rings with cooking grills. The campground amemities include a vault toilet. No drinking water is available and the campground is limited to trailers and motorhomes up to 32 feet long; there are no hookups within the campground.
Bear Valley Hot Spring sits at 6,210 feet above sea level, way above the mile-high mark. You may not feel the altitude strongly, but hot water still dehydrates you faster at elevation. UV is about 25% stronger than at sea level, so bring sunscreen and drink more water than you normally would.
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Springs Near Bear Valley Hot Spring
Alkaline Springs (pH ~9.5)
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