Big Warm Spring
Big Warm Spring comes up in Eureka County, roughly forty miles from Eureka, at the low edge of soaking temperature, the kind of warm that feels good in January and lukewarm in July. The USGS lists it as a thermal site. No landowner is on record and the public access line is empty, so the basics still need confirming.
Access is roadside. The spring lies some eighty yards off a road that has no name in the record. Elevation is in the range of fifty-six hundred feet, high desert basin, with nine inches of moisture in a typical year and around two feet of snow in winter.
Midwinter is the season on file, which fits a spring this mild. Roadside access, so no hike is involved. Ownership is unknown and access is not on file; assume it could be private until you learn otherwise. The temperature on file is an old survey number.
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 Warm 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
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 27 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the east
A slice through the ground from northwest to southeast, 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 19% 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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Big Warm Spring sits at 5,605 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 22% stronger than at sea level, so bring sunscreen and drink more water than you normally would.
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Big Warm Spring is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
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