Bijah Spring
Bijah Spring is a boiling-hot thermal feature beside the Grand Loop Road in Yellowstone National Park, a few miles from West Yellowstone. At nearly two hundred degrees it is water that will scald on contact, and it is park land, where thermal features are for looking at. OpenStreetMap calls it Bijah Springs, plural.
Fifty-some feet from the Grand Loop Road, at around 7,500 feet. Snow here runs over eleven feet a season and the summer is brief. Indian Creek Campground is the nearest listed camping, close to nine miles away.
Look, photograph, stay where the Park Service tells you to. The temperature on record is far past scalding. Winter months rank best on file, though snow access is its own question. The only water chemistry is a 2006 sample, acidic.
OpenStreetMap lists the feature under the plural form, Bijah Springs, and the USGS carries it as a numbered thermal site in the park.
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 Bijah 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.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the northeast.
- Highest ground nearby
- 363 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northeast
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 twice the US average of 65. It's higher than at 80% 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.
The water at Bijah Spring is acidic (pH 5.4).
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Overview Located about eight miles (13 km) south of Mammoth Hot Springs on the road to Norris, Indian Creek Campground—elevation 7,300 feet (2225 m)—sits near the base of the Gallatin Mountains and offers breathtaking views of Electric Peak. The area offers easy access to fishing and hiking. The campground is away from the main road and provides a quieter, more primitive, experience than many other locations. For reservations at the campgrounds managed by Yellowstone National Park Lodges (Fi...
Bijah Spring sits at 7,540 feet above sea level, way above the mile-high mark. You may not feel the altitude strongly, but hot water still dehydrates you faster at elevation. UV is about 30% stronger than at sea level, so bring sunscreen and drink more water than you normally would.
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Bijah Spring is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. The water is dangerously hot, so bring water shoes and test pools carefully. Cold air temperatures make a changing robe or warm layers essential.
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