Hot Springs
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
A thermal spring that goes by no more than the generic label Hot Springs, sitting in Humboldt County about a dozen miles out of Winnemucca. The water surfaces scalding, well past anything you could put a hand in, so it is a place to look at. Getting in is out of the question. Nobody has recorded who holds the ground, and nothing on file says if the public is welcome.
Reaching it means walking close to two miles from the nearest road, and the record does not give that road a name. The elevation puts it in Nevada's basin country a little above four thousand feet. Winters here bring a couple of feet of snow most years while the whole year sees about ten inches of moisture. Land ownership for the spring itself is blank.
Winter is the window rated highest here, December through February, when cold air makes a hot source worth the walk. Two feet of snow can bury the approach for weeks, so check conditions first. Treat the water as a burn hazard; it is far above the scalding line. Public access is not on record, so confirm you may be there before setting out.
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 Springs.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 4 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 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 52% 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 Springs 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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