Soda Springs
Soda Springs in Mineral County is a USGS thermal point thirty-one miles from Hawthorne, close enough to Veterans Memorial Highway that you could see it from the car. Body-temperature water, the kind you can sit in. Ownership and access are blank, so the legal side is unknown.
Ninety feet or so off the highway shoulder. Mid-elevation desert, dry even by Nevada measures with about five inches of rain in a year and a bit over a foot of snow. There is a photo on file but no description of the ground.
Go in winter, per the record. Roadside means no walk, which also means no privacy from passing traffic. Public or private, the record does not say. Water chemistry was not sampled here, and neither fee nor campground appears. The USGS number may not match what you find.
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 Soda 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
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 68 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the west
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 66% 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.
Some links are affiliate links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Soda Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.