Unnamed Thermal 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.
A nameless thermal point on BLM land in Cibola County, sixteen miles or so from Laguna. Barely warm water, under seventy degrees. Public ground, access open, and Petaca Pinta Road comes within a few hundred yards. This is one for the completist, a dot on the USGS thermal map, and the record holds nothing that suggests a pool.
The spring sits at about 5,750 feet on Rio Puerco Field Office land, dry country with light snow in winter. Petaca Pinta Road is about 350 yards away on foot. The record shows no campground within reach. No description of the ground around it exists on file, and no picture.
The record points to winter, and with water this cool it hardly matters which month you pick. A sample was taken in December 1941 but no chemistry values survive in the record. Free and open. Treat the temperature as historic.
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 this spring.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the southwest.
- Highest ground nearby
- 166 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southwest
A slice through the ground from southwest to northeast, 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 38% 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.
this spring sits at 5,759 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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