Pine Flat Hot Springs
Eighteen miles or thereabouts from Idaho City, in Boise County, Pine Flat Hot Springs sits on Boise National Forest ground that anyone can use. The water runs hot, past the range you would sit in without letting it cool first. OpenStreetMap spells it Pine Flats, with the s, and so does the campground a couple hundred yards away.
Banks Lowman Road runs a few hundred feet off, so reaching the spring is a short walk. The land is national forest at a low elevation for the Boise mountains. Climate figures show more than ten feet of snow a year and close to three feet of total precipitation, so the state of the road matters as much as the spring does.
Pine Flats campground is right there, a couple hundred yards from the water. On file, the best time is the dead of winter. At 138 degrees the source is hot enough to burn skin, so find where it has mixed and cooled before you get in, and keep children back from the outlet. The pH reading is from 1979. Forest Service land, open.
The record carries it as Pine Flat, singular. OpenStreetMap and the campground beside it go with Pine Flats.
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 Pine Flat Hot 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
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 830 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 twice the US average of 65. It's higher than at 82% 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 Pine Flat Hot Springs is alkaline (pH 9.2).
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Overview Pine Flats Campground is located a few miles west of Lowman, Idaho, along the Banks-Lowman Highway at an elevation of 3,700 feet. Visitors enjoy rafting, kayaking and fishing on the South Fork Payette River, and soaking in the hot springs at the river's edge.Recreation The South Fork Payette River flows next to the site, down a small hill, and offers trout fishing, rafting and kayaking. The Danskin River Access area is 5 miles west of the campground. A 1/4-mile nature trail begins i...
Pine Flat Hot Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. The water runs hot, so extra hydration is key.
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