Macfarlane 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.
Sixty-two miles from Lovelock, Macfarlane Hot Spring comes up scalding on open Bureau of Land Management ground in Pershing County's Black Rock Field Office. The water runs at a hundred seventy degrees. Access is open and the road is named, Jackson Creek Ranch Road, which removes two of the usual uncertainties. Chemistry has not been recorded, and no photo is on file.
Jackson Creek Ranch Road stops a few hundred feet short of the spring, and you walk the rest. The site is low, about forty-one hundred feet, and dry, seven inches of precipitation in a year and around a foot of snow. The parcel is plain public land.
Winter tops the list on record, and the thin snowfall makes that workable. The water will scald. Stay back from the source. A fee is not mentioned, and camping is not either. Sixty miles from Lovelock is a long way to come for a spring you cannot enter, so know that going in.
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 Macfarlane Hot Spring.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 60 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southeast
A slice through the ground from northwest to southeast, 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 37% 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.