Hot Lake
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
Hot Lake is a thermal feature in Lander County, a bit under forty miles from Battle Mountain. The record tags it hot without giving a temperature. Owner and access are blank. It is a hike to get there, close to three miles from the nearest road. That is most of what is known.
The walk in is about 2.8 miles from an unnamed road, at a little over five thousand feet. Winters drop around three feet of snow and the year brings a foot of precipitation. The record says nothing about the water itself, its size or how it is fed, and no photo exists on file.
There are no best months on record and no temperature to plan around, so treat this as a destination for someone who wants to see a thermal lake and is prepared for a long walk in with no guarantee of a soak. Check ownership before you go; no owner appears on file. No fee or campground 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 Hot Lake.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 34 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the south
A slice through the ground from north to south, 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 45% 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.