Granite Creek Hot Spring
Granite Creek Hot Spring is Forest Service land in Boise County, part of the Boise National Forest, a 21 mile run from Idaho City off Middle Fork Road. Low 130s at the source, hot. Access is recorded as open. Barber Flat Cabin, about seven miles off, is the closest camping on record. An image is on record, though nothing on file describes how or whether the water is pooled.
You can see the spring from the road; it is about 240 feet off Middle Fork Road at a little over four thousand feet. Winters drop around ten feet of snow; the climate is wet year round. That is the extent of what the record says about the site.
December into February is the window the best-months note favors. With ten feet of snow the drive becomes the variable, since the spring itself is roadside. The water needs cooling. A 1981 sample is the only chemistry on file and it read alkaline. Barber Flat Cabin is where the record points for camping.
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 Granite Creek 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
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 464 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the north
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 twice the US average of 65. It's higher than at 74% 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 Granite Creek Hot Spring is alkaline (pH 9.4).
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Overview The Barber Flat Cabin site was established for administrative use by the Forest Service in 1923, and was used prior to that by the Barber Lumber Company. At the time, the Forest Service used a cabin already on-site as a guard station and then built a new one in 1927. The current cabin and outbuildings were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1935, and the cabin today looks much as it did back then. Guests can drive to Barber Flat Cabin in two-wheel drive passenger cars or tr...
Granite Creek Hot Spring is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. The water runs hot, so extra hydration is key.
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