Wolf Creek 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.
Scalding water at the end of a hike: Wolf Creek Hot Springs, Gallatin County, Montana, twenty-three miles from Big Sky. The water is much too hot to enter at the source. Nobody has filled in an owner or an access status. The USGS has a site here with chemistry from August 1976. A campground is close, which helps.
Sun Ranch Road, about 1.3 miles off, is the closest road, so count on a hike. The spring sits high. Snow is heavy, nearly nine feet in a season, and precipitation is moderately high. Palisades Campground is a little over two miles away. No land unit or owner is named for the ground the route crosses.
Scalding water; stay out of it and test anything downstream before touching. The record flags winter, which with nine feet of snow and a mile-plus approach is a serious undertaking. Palisades Campground is close. Fee and access are blank; confirm ownership. The 1976 sample ran alkaline.
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 Wolf Creek Hot Springs.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 47 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northeast
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 2½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 95% 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 Wolf Creek Hot Springs is alkaline (pH 8.6).
The Palisades Recreation Area is located on the Upper Madison River, 5 river miles upstream of Ruby Creek Recreation Area and 25 miles south of Ennis. The campground has 10 camping sites with 2 accessible vault toilets and a campground host pad. A separate day use site with a paved boat launch and parking area is located near the campground.
Wolf Creek Hot Springs sits at 6,116 feet above sea level, way above the mile-high mark. You may not feel the altitude strongly, but hot water still dehydrates you faster at elevation. UV is about 24% stronger than at sea level, so bring sunscreen and drink more water than you normally would.
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