Hot Creek Ranch Spring
Hot Creek Ranch Spring sits inside the Wayne E. Kirch Wildlife Management Area in Lincoln County, state fish-and-wildlife ground nearly fifty miles from Pioche. Access is listed as restricted. The water is right at the bottom of soaking temperature, ninety degrees, and a 2022 sample found it low in dissolved solids, near neutral. A photo exists.
Only a few hundred feet of ground separate the spring from the nearest road, which nobody bothered to name. It sits inside a state conservation area run for wildlife. Elevation is a bit over five thousand feet. Dry country, eight inches of moisture in a year, with eighteen inches or so of snow in winter. Since the designation reads State Conservation Area, what you are allowed to do around the water is worth checking first.
Restricted is the word on record for access, so this is a call-ahead spring. The managing agency is the state fish and wildlife department, SFW in the record. The season on file is the cold one, December through February. Fee and campground: none listed. The 2022 sample is recent, which is rare in these records, so the temperature and chemistry are likely current.
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 Hot Creek Ranch 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.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 25 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southwest
A slice through the ground from south to north, 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 43% 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 Hot Creek Ranch Spring is slightly alkaline (pH 7.3) with 327 mg/L total dissolved solids.
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Hot Creek Ranch Spring is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
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