Mollys 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.
Nineteen or twenty miles from Cascade in Valley County, Idaho, Mollys Hot Spring is a Boise National Forest thermal source. The access status on record is open. The water is very hot, a few degrees shy of scalding, which means it burns and needs cooling before any soak. A 1980 sample put the pH high.
South Fork Road runs close, a few hundred feet from the spring, so this counts as roadside. National Forest land and nothing more specific in the designation. The snowfall on record is enormous, nearly seventeen feet in an average winter, and the year is very wet. Mid elevation, cool average temperature, and a campground not far along the road.
Winter is listed as best, which given the snow would be a serious undertaking. Picnic Point campground is a little over a mile away. Treat the water as scalding; it is close enough to that line that the difference hardly matters. Test from the edge. The chemistry reading is over forty years old.
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 Mollys Hot Spring.
- Setting
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 435 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the west
A slice through the ground from west to east, 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 79% 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 Mollys Hot Spring is alkaline (pH 9.3).
Overview Picnic Point Campground is located on a bluff overlooking beautiful Warm Lake, at an elevation of 5,300 feet. Visitors enjoy boating, fishing, swimming, hiking and viewing local wildlife. Recreation Warm Lake offers great fishing opportunities for cutthroat, rainbow, lake and bull trout. Boating, canoeing and swimming are popular activities. A boat ramp is located at neighboring Shoreline Campground. Billy Rice Swim Beach is within walking distance, offering a day-use site for picni...
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