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.
A few miles out of McGill, in White Pine County, an unnamed thermal point sits on BLM ground under the Fillmore Field Office. Barely warm is the honest description of the water. It turns up in USGS thermal surveys all the same. Open public access is the main thing going for it, which counts for something when the flow runs this cool.
Foot Ranch Road runs about two hundred feet from the spring, close enough to count as roadside. The elevation is high-desert basin, under five thousand feet, and the climate is dry with roughly seven inches of precipitation and a light winter snowfall. Bureau of Land Management land surrounds it.
The record picks the winter months. No campground is listed within range, so plan on a day trip from McGill. No water sample has been taken, and the temperature carries no date, so a hand test on arrival will tell you more than the table does. Open access on public land means no permission to seek, though nothing on file describes any facilities.
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
- 21 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the east
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 close to the US average of 65. It's higher than at 1% 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.