Warm Lake 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.
Warm Lake Springs is a thermal site in the Boise National Forest, Valley County, roughly twenty miles out of Cascade. The record shows it open. The name suggests warmth and that is as far as the record goes: there is no temperature on record, only a 1972 water sample showing modest dissolved solids, so nothing can be said about how warm it runs, let alone soakability.
The springs sit a fifth of a mile or so past the closest road, and that road goes unnamed on record. National forest, a bit above five thousand feet. Snow here is extreme. Seventeen feet falls in a normal winter, in a climate that stays wet through the year.
No best season is listed, and with no temperature either, this is a site to treat as unknown. Picnic Point campground sits under a mile away, which makes it easy to base nearby. The only measurement is a water sample from August 1972, and nothing on file says what the springs look like or whether anyone soaks there.
Federal hydrologists have a USGS site record on the books for these springs.
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 Warm Lake Springs.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 78 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 83% 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 Warm Lake Springs contains 258 mg/L total dissolved solids.
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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...
Warm Lake Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. Cold air temperatures make a changing robe or warm layers essential.
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