Unnamed Thermal Spring
Water at this unnamed thermal point in Humboldt County comes out far too hot to touch, well up into scalding territory. The ground belongs to the Bureau of Land Management and is administered from the Humboldt River Field Office, with Winnemucca the nearest city at sixty-odd miles. Access is on record as open. A USGS crew sampled it in October 1960 and found alkaline water with a modest mineral load. Someone has photographed it, and the image is on file.
This one is practically on the road, a few dozen feet from the track, though the record leaves that track unnamed. Basin elevation. The winters drop a fair bit of snow, close to three feet across the season, and the rest of the year is dry. Plain BLM land. Nothing on file describes the ground around the source or says if anything has been built there.
The record gives winter the best marks, which for a roadside stop mostly means watching the snow. This water will scald. Keep skin out of it and keep anyone unsteady on their feet back from the edge. No fee appears in the record and there is no campground on file. The chemistry dates from 1960.
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 this spring.
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
- 19 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the north
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 40% 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 This spring is alkaline (pH 9.3) with 344 mg/L total dissolved solids.
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this spring is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. The water is dangerously hot, so bring water shoes and test pools carefully.
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