Pinto Hot 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.
Pinto Hot Springs is a near-boiling source in Humboldt County, more than sixty miles from Winnemucca, on public land managed by the BLM's Black Rock Field Office. The record marks access open. The water is nearly at the boiling point, so this is a place to see, and the 1974 water sample is the only chemistry on file.
The walk in from the road is about a fifth-mile, and no road name is given. Open BLM desert at roughly the four-thousand-foot mark, dry at eight inches of precipitation, with light snow. Summers are hot and winters cold. No designation beyond ordinary public land. The Black Rock Field Office is the managing unit.
Water this close to boiling will scald on contact. Stay far from the source and from any channel leaving it. The listed window is midwinter. No campground is recorded, and Winnemucca is a long way off, so be self-sufficient. The chemistry reading is half a century old.
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 Pinto Hot Springs.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the northwest.
- Highest ground nearby
- 35 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northwest
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 twice the US average of 65. It's higher than at 71% 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 Pinto Hot Springs is neutral (pH 7.1). It is notably rich in sodium (supports circulation and skin hydration) and chloride (natural antiseptic with skin health benefits).