Spring (Hot)
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
Another unnamed hot spring near Alturas, this one about 370 feet from the road on BLM ground, open, in the Black Rock Field Office. The record puts it in Modoc County. Hot water, above the range most people can sit in.
Short walk in. Four thousand feet up, give or take. Winters are snowy in a modest way, roughly two feet, and the year is dry otherwise at ten inches or so. There is no photo and no chemistry work. Temperature and location are all anyone has written down.
December through February on record as best. Hot enough to need caution; test with a hand before anything else. No water sample on file, so mineral content is a guess. Access listed as open. Nothing about fees or camping.
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 Spring (Hot).
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 39 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 65% 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.