Moorman 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.
Moorman Spring sits in White Pine County, almost fifty miles from Ely, a long drive. The water is soaking warm. The temperature is a shade above body heat, the comfortable end of the scale. OpenStreetMap carries it under the same name, which is a small confirmation that the place exists beyond a USGS table. Access and ownership are not recorded.
Roadside, some 140 feet off a road the record does not name. Mid elevation basin, dry, eight inches of precipitation, under two feet of snow. Warm summers, cold winters. A 2022 sample put the water at neutral with a light mineral load, which is recent. Land unit and designation are blank.
Winter is when the record says to come. No campground is on file. Ownership and permission are both unwritten, so that question comes first. Roadside access means no walking. Snow totals are modest here, under two feet in an ordinary year, so snow is a minor concern on the drive 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 Moorman Spring.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 1 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the south
A slice through the ground from north to south, 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 20% 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 Moorman Spring is neutral (pH 7.0) with 349 mg/L total dissolved solids.
Moorman Spring sits at 5,295 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 21% stronger than at sea level, so bring sunscreen and drink more water than you normally would.
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