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.
An unnamed thermal point in Terrell County, Texas, some 24 miles from Sanderson. The water is lukewarm, at the low edge of what anyone would call a soak, and there is no record of a pool or an owner. Access is unlisted. This is a dot on a survey map with a temperature attached.
Roughly seven tenths of a mile on foot gets you there, starting from a road with no recorded name. The country is low desert, a bit over fifteen hundred feet, with ten inches of rain in an average year and snow almost never. Sanderson is the only town anywhere near. Land ownership is unknown.
Cool weather is the time, December to February. Because nothing on file says if this is public ground, treat it as private until you learn otherwise, and ask around in Sanderson. The warmth is marginal, so do not drive out expecting a hot bath. No campground is listed within reach and no one has sampled the water.
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
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 737 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 close to the US average of 65. It's higher than at 6% 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.