Colgate Warm Springs
Colgate Warm Springs is called warm and measures hot, a bit over a hundred degrees, which puts it in soaking range. It sits in the Clearwater National Forest in Mineral County with Superior listed as the nearest town, essentially on its doorstep. The public may come, per the record, and the Forest Service owns the ground. The site is low for the region, about three thousand feet, with heavy snow and heavy rain both.
Park and walk roughly five hundred feet. The road is not named in the record. What stands out is the weather: seventeen-plus feet of snow per winter and nearly fifty inches of precipitation, wet by any Idaho standard. Whitehouse Campground is the closest developed site, eight and a half miles off.
The record ranks the three winter months best, and with that much snow the last stretch could be on foot. Water around 106 is hot enough to make you sit on the edge first. The chemistry on file is a July 1982 sample, very alkaline. Whitehouse is the camping option. A photograph exists for this one.
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 Colgate Warm 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.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the northeast.
- Highest ground nearby
- 460 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northeast
A slice through the ground from southwest to northeast, 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 29% 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 Colgate Warm Springs is alkaline (pH 9.5).
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Approximately an hour west of Lolo, MT at mile post 158.5 of the famous Northwest Passage Scenic Byway and All American Road (US Highway 12), directly across from the Lochsa Wild and Scenic River, rests the Whitehouse Campground. This riverside campground has 13 sites and due to its close proximity to the Lewis and Clark Trail, has much more to offer than just camping. It's an ideal location for fishing, hiking, back packing, nature viewing or as a place to stop and have a picnic while enjo...
Colgate Warm Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
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