Roadside Springs, Frying Pan Spring
Frying Pan Spring belongs to the group filed as the Roadside Springs, and it sits right at the edge of the Grand Loop Road in Yellowstone. The water scalds, and the 2006 sample came back acidic. You pull over and there it is. Gallatin County, and the Park Service owns it. Access is open. West Yellowstone is the closest town. OpenStreetMap lists it as Roadside Spring East with a monitoring code attached.
Roadside is the access class, and the record puts it under 150 feet from the Grand Loop Road. Around 7,500 feet up. The climate on record is cold, a year-round average in the mid thirties, and the snow total runs a little over eleven feet. Moderate precipitation. Yellowstone National Park throughout.
Scalding, and acidic with it, so skin and water do not mix here. Stay on the road shoulder or boardwalk. Winter is rated best on record, which in practice means the Grand Loop Road under snow, so check whether it is open. Indian Creek Campground is around nine miles away, the nearest camp on file. No fee listed.
OpenStreetMap names this point Roadside Spring East (MNCNN031), a monitoring label. The USGS holds a site record, with the water chemistry on file sampled in June 2006.
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 Roadside Springs, Frying Pan 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
- 260 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northeast
A slice through the ground from southwest to northeast, about 0.6 miles end to end.
Elevation data: USGS 3D Elevation Program. Aerial imagery: USGS The National Map. Public domain.
Landsat's thermal camera passed over on a clear winter day, December 3, 2022. This spring's heat shows up from about 440 miles up. The brightest yellow marks the warmest ground, roughly 10°F warmer than the land around it.
Drag to compare. The view is about 2½ miles across, and each thermal pixel covers roughly 300 feet of ground, so individual pools blur into one warm patch.
Thermal: Landsat 8/9 surface temperature, USGS (public domain), via Microsoft Planetary Computer. Aerial: USGS The National Map. More springs seen from space.
That's about twice the US average of 65. It's higher than at 84% 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 Roadside Springs, Frying Pan Spring is acidic (pH 4.7).
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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...
Roadside Springs, Frying Pan Spring sits at 7,520 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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Roadside Springs, Frying Pan 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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