Unnamed Thermal 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.
Harney County's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge holds this unnamed thermal point, about 22 miles from Hines. Tepid water, right around seventy degrees. Access is restricted. Since this is a wildlife refuge, its own rules decide if you can get to it at all. The USGS lists it under a site number of its own.
The nearest road is South Harney Lake Lane, and the spring is a two and a half mile hike from it across refuge land managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The elevation is around forty-one hundred feet. Snow is moderate, under two feet most winters, and the year is dry at about a foot of precipitation.
Winter months are flagged on file. Access is listed as restricted, so check with the refuge before setting out and expect closures. The water is too cool for soaking anyway. No campground or fee is recorded. The hike is long enough to plan for.
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 this spring.
- Setting
- Open ground
- Flat, open ground all around.
- Highest ground nearby
- 1 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the south
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.