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.
Roughly five miles from Alturas, a thermal point with no name in Modoc County puts out water at soaking temperature, a bit above body heat. The record is silent on who owns the land and on public access, so treat this as unverified until you know more. A 1980 USGS sample measured low dissolved solids and nothing else.
A walk of about a thousand feet gets you there, starting from a road the record never names. Elevation is middling. Snow piles up to roughly two feet in most winters, and the year totals around ten inches of moisture. The big unknown is what larger tract this sits on and what designation, if any, it carries. No campground is listed.
Before going, find out who owns the ground; nothing on file says it is public. Midwinter is the rated season. The water is a comfortable temperature and poses no burn risk. No fee is recorded. The only chemistry is a dissolved-solids reading from May 1980.
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
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 30 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northwest
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 67% 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 contains 233 mg/L total dissolved solids.