Unnamed Thermal Spring
Scalding water on Bureau of Land Management ground, seventy miles from Lovelock in Pershing County. This unnamed thermal point falls under the Black Rock Field Office and access on record is open. In July 1980 a USGS sample came back alkaline, with calcium, sodium, sulfate and chloride among the dissolved salts. There is no photo of it on file and nobody has given it a name.
Short walk from a road with no name in the record, a few hundred yards. Low and dry: snow seldom tops a foot in a winter. Plain BLM land with no special designation. Nothing on file about camping nearby. Lovelock is seventy miles off, so this is a long drive for a spring you cannot get into.
The record's best season is December through February. Scalding water, so do not touch it, and keep a close eye on anyone with you. The walk in is short. No fee listed. Chemistry from 1980 is the only sample, and the temperature on file 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
- 29 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 21% 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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