Buckaroo Hot Spring
Another Elmore County spring within walking distance of Mountain Home Air Force Base, Buckaroo Hot Spring comes out a little warmer than its neighbor at Hot Creek, in the upper 100s, a temperature most people would call a hot bath. The road it sits beside is not named on file, and no land owner is listed. There is a photograph.
Desert floor, low and dry. You would be standing about 200 feet from the road at low elevation, with roughly ten inches of precipitation a year and almost no snow. Summer heat is the main weather here. The road name is missing from the record, so the coordinates on the map are what you have to work with.
The cold months are the ones flagged as best. Since snow barely registers here, getting in is rarely a weather problem in any season. No campground appears nearby. The chemistry dates from a 1989 sample. Public access is not recorded, and with the air base so close it would be worth confirming ownership before treating this as a place to 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 Buckaroo 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.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the south.
- Highest ground nearby
- 179 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the south
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 55% 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 Buckaroo Hot Spring is slightly alkaline (pH 8.2).
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Springs Near Buckaroo Hot Spring
More Springs Around 109°F
Slightly Alkaline Springs (pH ~8.2)
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