Crane Hot Springs
Crane Hot Springs in Harney County, Oregon, is one of the hotter sources on file, scalding at the outlet, about twenty-four miles from Burns. Ownership is unlisted and so is public access, so this page cannot tell you whether you can walk up to it. The water is alkaline with a fair mineral load, last sampled in 1968, and the USGS carries the spring under a site number.
Five hundred feet or so from an unnamed road. High desert at a bit over four thousand feet, dry, with light snow. No campground on file, no land unit, no designation. The surroundings, as far as the record goes, are a road and the spring.
Winter shows as the best window. The water will burn you at the source; find out where it has cooled before you touch it. Access and ownership are unknown in the record, so make inquiries before driving out. The chemistry is more than fifty years old, so the pH and mineral figures are a snapshot of another era, and nothing newer has been logged.
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 Crane Hot Springs.
Drag the handle to compare the two views. 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
- 10 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northwest
A slice through the ground from northwest to southeast, 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 4% 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 Crane Hot Springs is slightly alkaline (pH 8.3) with 545 mg/L total dissolved solids.
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Crane Hot Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. The water is dangerously hot, so bring water shoes and test pools carefully.
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