Boiling 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.
Boiling Springs earns the name. The water on record is far past scalding, close to a rolling boil, and nobody soaks in it. It lies in Lyon County about forty-nine miles from Fernley. No owner is named for the land and there is no entry for public access, so the record tells you what it is and little about your right to stand next to it.
Under five hundred feet of walking gets you from the closest road to the springs, and that road has no recorded name. Desert basin at around four thousand feet. Ten inches of wet in a year, a foot and a half of snow. The ground stays dry most of the year.
December through February carry the top rating. This water will scald instantly; stay back from the source and from any runoff near it, and keep dogs and kids on a leash or a hand. Access and ownership are unknown. Assume nothing.
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 Boiling Springs.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the west.
- Highest ground nearby
- 356 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the west
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 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 55% 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.