Ellison Ranch 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.
Ellison Ranch Warm Spring is a thermal point right outside Carlin, Nevada, about three and a half miles from town in Elko County. The record marks it warm without a measured temperature. Who holds the land is not listed, and neither is public access.
Park and you are basically there. A few dozen feet separate the spring from the road, which nobody has named on the books. Five thousand feet up. Snow runs to about three feet in a typical winter, and the year brings roughly a foot of precipitation.
Best months are absent from the record. There is no temperature to go on, so soaking is off the table. The one water sample, from 1990, came back near neutral with the usual mineral list. Access and owner unknown, so ask around in Carlin before walking onto anything. No campground nearby is listed.
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 Ellison Ranch Warm Spring.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the west.
- Highest ground nearby
- 402 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the west
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 53% 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 Ellison Ranch Warm Spring is slightly alkaline (pH 7.5).