Hot Seeps (San Emidio Desert)
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
The name says seeps and the temperature says near boiling, a couple of hundred degrees. Hot Seeps in the San Emidio Desert are listed in Lyon County with Fernley the nearest town at fifty-eight miles. Ownership and access are unknown; water chemistry and a photo are missing too. They sit within fifty feet of a road.
The seeps are essentially roadside, under fifty feet from a road with no name in the record, in low desert a little above four thousand feet. This is dry ground, an annual ten inches of precipitation, with twenty-odd inches of snow over winter. The ground they rise through and what drains from them go undescribed.
Water near boiling will take skin off. Keep back from the seeps and keep anyone small or four-legged back further. The record likes December through February. Because no owner is named and access is not recorded, assume permission is needed until you learn otherwise. Roadside class; no fee or camping on file.
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 Seeps (San Emidio Desert).
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 79 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the east
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 twice the US average of 65. It's higher than at 71% 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.