Basque 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.
Basque Spring lies inside Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, Harney County, Oregon, roughly twenty two miles from Hines. The US Fish and Wildlife Service manages the land and access is restricted. The water measured 74 degrees, tepid. This is a refuge site first and a spring second, and refuge rules govern everything about a visit.
An unnamed road comes within a fifth of a mile or so, and the remaining distance is refuge ground covered on foot, at around forty one hundred feet. Winter is dry and not deeply snowy, a couple of feet at most, and the rest of the year is moderate. No campground appears nearby in the record.
The rankings favor January, with the rest of winter close behind. Restricted access means you contact the refuge before doing anything else. The water is cool enough that soaking is unlikely to be the draw. The USGS lists it as a thermal site. No fee on file and no listed camping.
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 Basque Spring.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 21 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 close to the US average of 65. It's higher than at 10% 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.