Mosley 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.
Off Dark Canyon Road in Eddy County, around fifteen miles from Carlsbad, Mosley Spring comes up barely warm. Upper sixties. That is swimming hole temperature on a hot day and nothing more. Access is unrecorded. A 1949 sample showed a moderate mineral load of calcium, magnesium, sulfate and chloride, and nothing has been run since.
Dark Canyon Road passes within a hundred feet. Low desert under 4,000 feet, hot through the summer and dry all year. Snow hardly ever. Owner and unit are missing. Sunset Reef Campground is about nine miles off. Rain is scarce. Dark Canyon Road is the only named feature on file, and the road class says you can see it from the car.
Camping on record: Sunset Reef, nine miles. The sample is old, 1949. Confirm land ownership before stopping, because the road frontage belongs to someone. Midwinter is when the low desert is bearable. There is no reason to expect a soak at this temperature, so think of it as a landmark and a data point.
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 Mosley Spring.
- Setting
- Gentle slope
- The ground tilts gently up to the south.
- Highest ground nearby
- 156 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the south
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 close to the US average of 65. It's higher than at 0% 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 Mosley Spring contains 519 mg/L total dissolved solids. It is notably rich in magnesium (known for muscle relaxation and stress relief).
Sunset Reef Campground is a reclaimed well pad with 11 developed campsites; five RV spaces and six tent sites. Each site has a shaded picnic table, fire pit and grill for your camping convenience with a vault toilet on site. Visitors can dry camp at this campground for a maximum of five nights for free. If on the hunt for a great place to camp while exploring the two national parks in the area, this is the place to stay! Carlsbad Caverns is a 25-minute drive (14 miles) to the north and Guada...
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