Deer Butte Hot 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.
Out in Malheur County, thirteen miles from Nyssa, Deer Butte Hot Spring is a low-elevation thermal spring a few degrees past where most people would want to sit for long. Who owns it, and if the public may use it, are both blank on the record. No photo has been filed either.
Owyhee Lake Road gets you within about 140 feet, a roadside spot by any measure. This is dry country at under twenty-five hundred feet, with barely ten inches of rain a year and a thin dusting of snow most winters. Summers run warm. No land unit or managing agency is listed, so treat the ground as unknown until you see otherwise.
The record favors midwinter, when the air is cold enough to make hot water appealing. Light snow here rarely amounts to much. Test the water before getting in, since it runs hotter than comfortable for more than a quick dip. No campground is on file nearby, and no access status either, so a look for fences or signs is worth your time.
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 Deer Butte Hot Spring.
- Setting
- Valley floor
- Gentle slopes rise on both sides.
- Highest ground nearby
- 117 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 about 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 20% 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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