Hot Sulphur Lake
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
Hot Sulphur Lake is a thermal site in Gooding County, thirteen miles or so from the town of Gooding. Despite the name, the recorded water temperature is tepid, low eighties, pleasant on a cold day and nothing more. It sits practically at the roadside. Ownership and access are unknown to us, and we cannot say what the lake itself looks like.
A hundred feet or so separates it from the nearest road, an unnamed one. Low elevation, dry country: a dozen inches of precipitation in a year and light snow. No campground is listed for this one, and no land manager either. The USGS has a site number for it. The temperature is the only measurement attached to that number.
January and the months either side of it are the driest. Roadside access means you could check it from the car. No temperature survey date is recorded, so the reading may be old, and no chemistry was sampled despite the sulphur in the name. Public access is unrecorded; look for signs and fences before stepping off the road.
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 Hot Sulphur Lake.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 30 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northwest
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 24% 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.
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