Flagstaff 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.
Flagstaff Butte Hot Spring is filed under Humboldt County. Winnemucca is the closest town, with no distance between the two ever recorded. The water runs hot, past comfortable soaking for most people, up where a dip calls for care. Nobody is listed as the owner and access is unknown.
Whitehorse Ranch Road passes fifteen feet from it, about as roadside as a spring gets. The ground is high desert at roughly forty-six hundred feet, dry for most of the year. Winter snow totals run near two feet. Rain is scarce outside of winter storms. No land unit is listed. No photo either.
The record points to December through February as the time to go. Prolonged contact with water this hot will burn, so test before you commit. Nothing is listed for camping within reach, and Winnemucca is the recorded supply point. Since nobody is recorded as owner, watch for gates along Whitehorse Ranch Road.
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 Flagstaff Butte Hot Spring.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the north.
- Highest ground nearby
- 379 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the north
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 18% 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.