Sand Springs
Sand Springs is a thermal site on public land about twenty-three miles from Fallon in Churchill County, managed by the Stillwater Field Office of the BLM. The record calls it hot and holds no temperature reading at all, so do not plan a soak on the strength of that word. Access is open. A photograph is on file, which is more than many springs in this county can say.
Leave the vehicle and walk a few hundred feet. That is the approach. The ground is low desert under four thousand feet, and the climate is about as dry as Nevada gets, roughly seven inches of precipitation in a year and hardly any snow. Federal land without a special designation. The record gives no road name and lists no campground. Chemistry has never been sampled.
No best months are flagged on file, and with snowfall this light the drive in should be possible most of the year. Temperature is the thing to settle first, since none has been recorded and hot could mean anything. Carry water. Camping is unlisted, so Fallon is the practical base, and it is under half an hour of highway.
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 Sand 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.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the northeast.
- Highest ground nearby
- 22 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northeast
A slice through the ground from south to north, 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 36% 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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