Unnamed Thermal 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.
Fifty-some miles from Winnemucca, an unnamed thermal point on Humboldt River Field Office land in Humboldt County, Nevada. The water is tepid at best, seventy degrees, so nobody is going to warm up in it. BLM holds the ground and has it down as open. No chemistry was ever recorded here, and the USGS never assigned it a site number.
Reaching it means about a mile on foot, and the road you set out from carries no name in the record. Mid-elevation basin country. Snow is on the lighter side, eighteen inches in a normal winter, and the year is a dry one. No campground is listed anywhere close, and the land has no designation past plain public.
The record favors the dead of winter, though the water is too cool to matter much in the cold. Count on a mile of walking each way. There is nothing on file about a fee. Since no sample was ever taken, the temperature is the only measurement to go on, and when it was taken is not recorded either.
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.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the southeast.
- Highest ground nearby
- 105 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southeast
A slice through the ground from southwest to northeast, 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 26% 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.