Unnamed Thermal Spring
Far out in Pershing County, better than seventy miles from Lovelock, an unnamed thermal point on BLM land in the Black Rock Field Office runs scalding hot. The record lists it open, with no fee attached. In July 1980 a USGS sample found alkaline water with iron in it. At source temperature this is nothing a person can get into. The walk in is half a mile from the closest road.
That road has no name on file. Low basin elevation. Eighteen inches of snow in winter, and a dry year overall. Open country, BLM land without a further designation. Nothing about camping is recorded, and Lovelock, the nearest city, is a long way behind you. Take the whole year together and it comes out mid-fifties.
Winter, December through February, rates best. The water can scald in seconds. Keep out. Count on half a mile of walking each direction. Chemistry is forty-some years old, and nothing newer has been recorded. The temperature reading has no date attached.
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 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 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 25% 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 8.8).
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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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