Needle Hot Springs
A warm spring on the shore of Buffalo Bill Reservoir, inside the state park of the same name, five miles or so west of Cody in Park County. Needle Hot Springs carries the word hot in its name and does not live up to it. The water is tepid, fine for wading in summer and of no use for a soak. Access is open, and the road passes within a stone's throw.
You are on state park land at the reservoir, in the dry basin country east of the Absarokas. A car gets you there; the spring is less than sixty feet from pavement. Snow is moderate by Wyoming standards and the year sees under twenty inches of precipitation. The state park has fees and rules of its own that the record does not spell out.
Roadside and open, so any season works if the road is clear. The winter months are the ones recorded as best. Hogan and Luce Campground is the nearest listed, around twenty miles off. The water chemistry dates to an August 1970 sample and the temperature figure is from the same era, so expect drift. Salty water, judging by the dissolved solids.
Needle Hot Springs shares a USGS monitoring site with nearby Shoshone Hot Springs, and the 1970 chemistry on file for both is the same sample.
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 Needle Hot Springs.
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
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 1,272 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northeast
A slice through the ground from north to south, 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 2% 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 Needle Hot Springs is neutral (pH 7.0) with 1400 mg/L total dissolved solids. It is notably rich in calcium (may support bone density and joint health), magnesium (known for muscle relaxation and stress relief), and sulfate (traditionally used for skin conditions and inflammation).
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The Hogan and Luce Campground has five individual camp sites and one group site. It is located near two reservoirs. The campground next to the Hogan Reservoir has picnic tables, toilet facilities, bear-proof food storage boxes, grills/fire rings, horse trailer parking, horse stanchions, a boat ramp and hitching rails.
Needle Hot Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. Cold air temperatures make a changing robe or warm layers essential.
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