Buffalo 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.
Buffalo Springs is a scalding spring on public land in Lander County, about twenty-eight miles from Battle Mountain. The Bureau of Land Management holds the ground and the record marks it open. What comes out of the ground is far above anything safe to touch, so what you get here is a hot spring to look at, on open range, with nothing built around it on record.
Roadside access. The spring lies within ninety feet of the nearest road, and the road is anonymous on file, on the BLM's Humboldt River Field Office. Forty-six hundred feet or so of elevation, a dry basin, ten inches of precipitation, snow a little over two feet.
Winter, meaning December through February, is the recommended season on record. The source will scald on contact; keep a wide margin from it and from any hot runoff. Open BLM land; the record shows no fee and no campground. There is no USGS site number for this one, so the temperature has less paperwork behind it than most.
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 Buffalo Springs.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 44 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northwest
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 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.