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.
An unnamed hot spring one and a half miles from Alturas in Modoc County, sitting on BLM land run by the Black Rock office, with access listed open. The water is hot, hot enough that most people would not get in without mixing in something cooler, though it stops short of scalding. A USGS site number is attached to this point, with no sample results behind it.
The road runs right past. Nineteen feet, per the record, from an unnamed track to the source. That makes it about as roadside as a spring gets. Moderate elevation with real winters, three feet of snow being typical, and a yearly precipitation total around eleven inches. Ordinary BLM land. No designation and nothing about camping.
The winter months get the nod on the record. Hot water, so test before touching and keep anyone unsteady well back. A fee is not mentioned anywhere on file. With Alturas this close, town is the fallback for supplies and a bed.
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 east.
- Highest ground nearby
- 117 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the east
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 78% 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.