Darroughs Hot Springs
The water at Darroughs Hot Springs comes out right around boiling, hot enough to kill. That single fact should shape every decision about visiting. The springs are in Nye County, Nevada, fifty-odd miles from Tonopah, with no land owner or access status recorded. A 1973 water sample came back strongly alkaline.
Three hundred feet of ground separate the spring from the nearest road, whose name is not recorded. That puts it in the drive-up category. Elevation is fairly high for a Nevada valley, and winters show it: snow totals run over three feet a season. Rain is scarce the rest of the year, eleven inches or so.
Winter months rank best on file. Scalding water, no question. Source temperature is near boiling, so keep children and dogs back from any open pool and never step in without knowing exactly how the water has cooled. Nobody has filled in ownership or access, and the only water sample is half a century old. Nothing is listed for camping nearby.
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 Darroughs Hot 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.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the west.
- Highest ground nearby
- 99 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 57% 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 Darroughs Hot Springs is alkaline (pH 9.3) with 390 mg/L total dissolved solids.
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Darroughs Hot Springs sits at 5,600 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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Darroughs Hot Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. The water is dangerously hot, so bring water shoes and test pools carefully.
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