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.
The record carries this one under the bare name Spring, a warm spring on Gila National Forest land. The county is Grant, in New Mexico's southwest corner, and the closest town of any size is Arenas Valley, roughly 35 miles off. The water comes out a few degrees under body heat, warm enough to notice on a cold day and little more than that. Access is listed as open and the ground belongs to the Forest Service. Close to four miles of walking lie between it and the nearest road.
Mid-elevation forest, a bit over six thousand feet up. Upper Scorpion Camp Ground Road is the nearest road on file, and from there you are on foot for the rest of the way. Winters drop a modest amount of snow, enough to matter underfoot on a trail, and the year as a whole stays fairly dry. Forks Campground is the closest developed camp the record knows of, around eight miles off.
December through February show up as the best months on file, which says something about how warm the summers run in this corner of the state. Count on a real walk in with no trailhead details recorded. Forks is the nearest place to pitch a tent. No fee is noted. Nobody has logged a water sample or described a pool here, so treat the temperature as a rough figure and see what you find.
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 Spring.
- Setting
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 783 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 53% 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.
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This campground features beautiful cliffs along the West Fork of the Gila River.This campground is a great place to stop on the way to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument (15 miles north). Overnight camping is allowed in the upper portion of Forks; however, the lower portion of the Forks Recreation Site along the West Fork of the Gila River is day use only.
Spring sits at 6,024 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 24% stronger than at sea level, so bring sunscreen and drink more water than you normally would.
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Spring is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear.
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