Hot Springs
The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
Hot Springs near Carlin in Elko County, twenty-seven miles from town, on BLM land handled by the Tuscarora Field Office. Access is open. High seventies is the water temperature, pleasant to stand in and nothing to fear. Chemistry dates to 1974 and sits near neutral.
A couple of hundred yards from a road with no name attached. The spring sits at about fifty-seven hundred feet in country that collects forty-odd inches of snow each winter and a foot of moisture over the year. Cool on average. No photo is attached.
The cold months are the ones flagged, December through February, which is also when access roads at this elevation are least reliable; nothing on file says if the road is plowed. BLM land, open; fees and campgrounds are not recorded. High-seventies water cannot burn you. The chemistry is more than fifty years old.
USGS hasn't flown a detailed laser scan here yet, so this view comes from aerial photos and older elevation data.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the east.
- Highest ground nearby
- 182 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the east
A slice through the ground from southwest to northeast, 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 33% 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 Springs is slightly alkaline (pH 7.3).
Hot Springs sits at 5,709 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 23% stronger than at sea level, so bring sunscreen and drink more water than you normally would.
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