Big (Ash Meadows) 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.
Big Spring is a warm desert spring in Nye County, about nineteen miles from Pahrump, inside Ash Meadows, a national wildlife refuge. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service runs the place and lists this spring's access as restricted. Tepid water, warm to the hand and short of bath temperature. Bathing is off the table; this is protected refuge water.
A road runs a little over a hundred feet off, though no name for it was recorded. This is low ground on the Mojave desert floor, where rain amounts to maybe four inches in an average year and snow almost never falls. Federal refuge land, nothing beyond that.
Go in winter; the record scores December through February best and the desert is at its kindest then. Access is restricted, so expect viewing only and leave the water alone. Chemistry on file dates from a 1996 sample and shows moderately mineralized water with a near-neutral pH. No camping or fee is recorded for this spot.
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 Big (Ash Meadows) Spring.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 10 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the north
A slice through the ground from north to south, 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 46% 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 Big (Ash Meadows) Spring is slightly alkaline (pH 7.3) with 480 mg/L total dissolved solids.
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