Butterfield Springs
The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
Forty-five miles or so from Pioche, in Lincoln County, Nevada, Butterfield Springs comes out tepid, cooler than your skin. A 1981 analysis found neutral pH, with calcium and sulfate among the minerals listed. A USGS site number is attached. No owner and no access status have been recorded, so the basic questions about visiting are unanswered.
The road is under eighty feet away. This is upland Nevada at moderate elevation, where winters bring over two feet of snow and summers stay dry. no land unit is on record and so is designation. Nothing in the file describes what the springs emerge into, or how many there are.
The file names winter as the season; snow is the thing that would stop you. The water is too cool to call a soak. Access is blank, so find out whose land it is before you turn in. Fee and camping are absent from the record, and the chemistry is more than forty years old.
USGS hasn't flown a detailed laser scan here yet, so this view comes from aerial photos and older elevation data.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the east.
- Highest ground nearby
- 115 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the east
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 28% 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 Butterfield Springs is slightly alkaline (pH 7.3).
Butterfield Springs sits at 5,320 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 21% stronger than at sea level, so bring sunscreen and drink more water than you normally would.
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