Dunn 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.
Dunn Spring lies inside Harney County's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, about twenty miles from Hines. It is a warm spring in name only; the water is barely warm, at the low end of tepid. The refuge restricts access here. For most readers this is a place on a map with a USGS site number attached.
There is no road close by. The nearest one is a bit over a mile off, with no name given for it, so getting there means a hike across refuge land. Fish and Wildlife manages the ground. The basin floor here is around forty-one hundred feet, where winter drops roughly two feet of snow and dry months follow.
Winter tops the list on the record. But the restriction on access matters more than season. Ask the refuge before you go, and expect a no. Camping is not listed anywhere close, and the water is too cool to matter anyway. Nobody has photographed it for the record.
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 Dunn Spring.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 6 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the north
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 3% 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.