Wedell Hot Springs
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
OpenStreetMap calls it plain Hot Springs; the federal record calls it Wedell Hot Springs. Either way the water is scalding, above the threshold where skin burns. It sits on BLM land in Mineral County under the Stillwater Field Office, about thirty-six miles from Hawthorne, with open access. The file holds no chemistry and no image.
The last 0.2 miles are on foot, from a road without a name in the record. Low desert, a little above four thousand feet. The climate is very dry with almost no snow, so the approach is open most of the year. Public land, no designation. No campground is recorded. What the source looks like is anyone's guess from the file.
The file favors winter. Scalding water: test before any contact and keep pets back. The walk is short, access open, no fee mentioned. No camping is listed. Hawthorne is the last place to stock up, and it is a long way off.
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 Wedell Hot Springs.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 14 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southeast
A slice through the ground from south to north, 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 32% 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.