Howard Hot 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.
Howard Hot Spring lies far out in Humboldt County, sixty-six miles from Winnemucca, with water in the hot range, too warm for a long soak and below scalding. Its chemistry stands out on the record for being strongly alkaline with low dissolved solids, a soft, high-pH water. The sample dates to 1974. Nothing is on file about who owns the site.
The spring is within forty feet of a road whose name did not make it into the record. Elevation is low basin, a bit over four thousand feet. The climate is dry, ten inches a year, and winter snow tends to total a couple of feet. Nothing is listed for a land unit.
Pick a winter month, December through February. Roadside, so no walking. The nearest town is a long way off, so fill the tank first. Stay in the water long enough and it will burn. Nobody wrote down who holds access rights here, and the chemistry is fifty years old, so check both.
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 Howard Hot Spring.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the north.
- Highest ground nearby
- 24 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the north
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 40% 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 Howard Hot Spring is alkaline (pH 9.2) with 324 mg/L total dissolved solids.