Painted Hills Mine
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
The record calls this one Painted Hills Mine, a hot spring on Bureau of Land Management land in Humboldt County, public ground about 83 miles from Winnemucca. The water is hot, well past comfortable, into burn territory with any real contact. Access is listed as open.
This is as close to drive-up as it gets, barely forty feet off the road. The Humboldt River Field Office manages the land. Elevation is a bit under 5,000 feet. Rain is scarce, around eleven inches, with two feet of snow across the winter months. The record does not name the road. It also says nothing about whatever mine the name refers to.
Winter is the season on file. At this temperature, test before touching, and do not put a foot in the source. Open BLM land, no fee noted. No campground appears in the record. There is no USGS site attached, so the temperature reading has no clear provenance.
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 Painted Hills Mine.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the northwest.
- Highest ground nearby
- 342 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northwest
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 twice the US average of 65. It's higher than at 76% 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.