Alkali Hot Spring
Alkali Hot Spring sits at the ghost town of Alkali in Esmeralda County, Nevada, a little more than nine miles from Goldfield. The water comes out at the threshold of scalding, too hot to step into as it emerges. Ownership goes unrecorded, and public access along with it, so assume nothing. What the record does hold is a past: this was a working spa in the 1930s.
The spring is twenty-one feet off the road, which is as roadside as it gets. Around it is the site of a town that no longer has people in it. High desert, dry, six inches of precipitation in a year with a light winter snowfall. No land manager is named in the file. The ground could well be private, and nothing says there is a pool you can get into.
Winter is when the file says to come. Treat the water as dangerous at the source; it can burn skin on contact. Access is unrecorded and no land owner is listed, which means you need to find out who controls the site before you go in. Nothing on fees or camping, and no chemistry.
Alkali is a ghost town, and the spring is what the town was built around. Geni and Joe Guisti ran it as a spa in the 1930s. During Goldfield's boom the site had an indoor wooden swimming pool with a separate section for children, plus a big building that held a dining room, a kitchen, a dance hall and a bar.
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 Alkali Hot 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.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the south.
- Highest ground nearby
- 46 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the south
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 about 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 51% 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.
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Alkali Hot Spring is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. The water runs hot, so extra hydration is key.
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