Hot Creek Valley Spring
Hot Creek Valley Spring in Nye County runs scalding, above one hundred and forty degrees at the source. It is on BLM land out of the Tonopah Field Office, open to the public, and remote, with Tonopah itself fifty-seven miles away. Blue Jay Well Road is the nearest road, a bit under a mile off. No water chemistry and no photo are on file.
Call it a short walk on paper, eight tenths of a mile from Blue Jay Well Road across public land. At about fifty-three hundred feet the spring sits in dry basin country, with seven inches of precipitation a year and around twenty inches of snow over winter. What the walk crosses goes unmentioned. The record gives an average temperature in the mid-fifties.
Winter months on record: December, January, February. The water will burn skin on contact, so approach the source as you would a stove. Look for cooler water before any soaking, and do not trust the temperature reading to be the whole story since no sample date is attached. Open access, with no fee or campground on record.
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 Valley 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
- 5 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 38% 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.
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Hot Creek Valley Spring sits at 5,350 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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Hot Creek Valley Spring 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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