Snively 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.
Snively Hot Spring is a scalding spring on BLM land in Malheur County, about fifteen miles from Nyssa along the road to Owyhee Lake. Public access is open. The water at the source is far above safe touching temperature, which is the one thing to know before any other.
Owyhee Lake Road runs about a hundred feet from the spring, so you can see it from the car. The Vale Malheur Field Office of the Bureau of Land Management manages the ground, which is listed as public. The elevation is low desert, under twenty-five hundred feet. Snow barely registers most winters and the annual precipitation is about ten inches.
Winter is the season on file. Source water is scalding, so stay well back from where it emerges and test anything downstream before touching it. No campground is recorded nearby and no fee is listed. The land is public and open, so the only real question is how hot the water is on the day you arrive.
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 Snively Hot Spring.
- Setting
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 731 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the southwest
A slice through the ground from west to east, 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 22% 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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