Beaverhead Rock 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.
Beaverhead Rock Spring sits right beside a road in Beaverhead County, fifteen miles or so from Dillon. It runs warm, about what you would call lukewarm in a tub. The land underneath carries no recorded owner, and access is an open question. Treat it as a point on the map, since nobody has confirmed it as a soak.
You can nearly touch it from the roadway; the record puts it under fifty feet from the road. The spring lies at low valley elevation in one of the drier corners of southwestern Montana, where winter snow is light and summers are dry. Which road, nobody wrote down.
Roadside access means no walking. The record favors December through February, and with the light snowfall here a winter stop is realistic. The nearest camp, Birch Creek Cabin, is nearly twenty miles away. Survey date and chemistry are both missing, as is the owner. Ask around in Dillon before you plan on it.
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 Beaverhead Rock Spring.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the west.
- Highest ground nearby
- 212 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 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 28% 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.
Overview Birch Creek Cabin is a historic log cabin with electricity. It provides access to a variety of hiking, ohv, and for cross-country skiing and snowshoe trails (depending on the season). A vaulted toilet lies 100' west of the cabin. Guests can typically access the cabin by vehicle, depending on conditions. The roads leading to the cabin are gravel - but suitable for passenger cars (depending on the season and snow levels). The final quarter-mile may be covered with impassible snow d...
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