Ash 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.
Ash Spring, eight and a half miles from Silver City in New Mexico's Grant County, is tepid, lukewarm to the touch. What is notable is the chemistry: a USGS sample from 1954 found low dissolved solids, close to ordinary fresh water. Ownership and access both go unrecorded, and no campground is listed.
Five hundred feet, give or take, from the closest road. Mid-elevation. Dry and mild, with roughly a foot of moisture a year and hardly any snow. No campground is listed. No land unit shows up, and the road goes unnamed. Nothing in the row names a trail or a land owner.
Best months on record are in winter; the climate is gentle then. Nothing listed for camping and nothing for fees. The chemistry is seventy years old and the temperature is undated. Access is unrecorded; ask who owns it. Too cool for a soak. The USGS site is the only formal record 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 Ash Spring.
- Setting
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 366 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northeast
A slice through the ground from northwest to southeast, 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 29% 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 Ash Spring contains 332 mg/L total dissolved solids.
Ash Spring sits at 5,800 feet above sea level, way above the mile-high mark. You may not feel the altitude strongly, but hot water still dehydrates you faster at elevation. UV is about 23% stronger than at sea level, so bring sunscreen and drink more water than you normally would.
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