Bedford 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.
Bedford Hot Springs is three miles from Townsend in Broadwater County, Montana. The name oversells it. What comes out is tepid, well under bath temperature. A USGS sample in 1993 came back mildly alkaline, with calcium and sodium among the minerals. No discharge was measured, so flow is unknown. Nobody has said who owns the ground or who may visit.
Roadside, with under two hundred feet between it and a road the record does not name. The valley is at modest elevation with lighter snow than the mountain springs, not quite four feet a year, and a moderate amount of precipitation. Indian Road Group Use Shelter is the nearest camping, a couple of miles off. There is no land unit on record, and no land owner.
Winter is listed as the season. A couple of miles to the shelter makes it an easy add-on if you are camping there anyway. Whether the land is open is not known, and nobody has recorded a fee. The sample is from 1993, so the reading is more than thirty years old and worth re-checking with a thermometer if you get there.
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 Bedford Hot Springs.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 52 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southwest
A slice through the ground from south to north, about 0.6 miles end to end.
Elevation data: USGS 3D Elevation Program. Aerial imagery: USGS The National Map. Public domain.
That's close to the US average of 65. It's higher than at 1% 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 Bedford Hot Springs is slightly alkaline (pH 8.2).
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Overview Indian Road Group Use Shelter is located at the southern end of Canyon Ferry Reservoir, just north of Townsend. It can accommodate up to 75 people and is attached to Indian Road campground. This 33’ X44’ shelter offers 8 picnic tables and 2 grills. Two vault toilets are located just across the parking lot. There is also a small fishing pond for kids and individuals with disabilities. This area is open to the public on a first come first serve baisis. Recreation Canyon Ferry Reservoir...
Bedford Hot Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
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