Parent 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.
Parent Springs comes up soaking warm in Nye County, on the Ash Meadows wildlife refuge about 24 miles out of Pahrump. Access is restricted. The refuge is US Fish and Wildlife ground, and its springs count as a protected system. Soaking is not an option here.
A short walk, about a third of a mile from Longstreet Road. This is low desert at roughly 2,300 feet, close to rainless, four inches a year, with snow essentially never. The refuge is federal land, and the spring sits within its boundary.
Winter months rate best on record and the mild climate backs that up. Restricted access means check refuge rules before you go. No fee or campground is listed. The temperature is a USGS reading, and no water chemistry is on file for this spring.
Ash Meadows is a National Wildlife Refuge under the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and Parent Springs is one of the thermal springs recorded inside it. The USGS holds a site record for it.
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 Parent Springs.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the east.
- Highest ground nearby
- 161 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 47% 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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