El Ojo Escondido
El Ojo Escondido is a tepid spring on Laguna Pueblo land in Cibola County, New Mexico, about twenty-one miles from Laguna. It is on tribal land and access is unrecorded, so the Pueblo's permission would be needed. The chemistry on file goes back to 1941, a sample that found moderate dissolved minerals and iron. A photograph exists.
Desert elevation, very dry, with almost no snow and little rain in a year. The spring is a short walk, about a hundred yards, from an unnamed road. Laguna Pueblo holds the land. No campground is listed anywhere near.
Ask the Pueblo before visiting; nothing on record says the public may go. No camping is listed. Nothing is recorded for fee or bathhouse. Winter tops the list on record, and the dry, nearly snowless climate makes that easy. The temperature and sample are from 1941 and may bear little relation to the spring today.
USGS hasn't flown a detailed laser scan here yet, so this view comes from aerial photos and older elevation data.
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
- 33 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the west
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 30% 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 El Ojo Escondido contains 239 mg/L total dissolved solids.
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El Ojo Escondido sits at 5,305 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 21% stronger than at sea level, so bring sunscreen and drink more water than you normally would.
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El Ojo Escondido is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
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