Thermopolis Hot Springs
Thermopolis Hot Springs is the big one in Wyoming, the source in Hot Springs State Park on the edge of Thermopolis, and its county is named Hot Springs for a reason. Water emerges hot, too hot to get into at the source. The park runs a free bath house where the water is cooled to bathing temperature. Roadside, open, state park ground.
In town, essentially, on state park land at the Bighorn River. The road is under a hundred feet away. Low elevation for Wyoming and dry, with mild mean temperatures and light snow. The record lists no campground.
Open year round, with winter listed as best on file. The State Bath House offers free soaking in moderated water, per Wikipedia. Source water is hot enough to burn, so keep to the developed pools. No campground is recorded here. The USGS site on file has no chemistry attached.
Hot Springs State Park is a public recreation area known for springs that flow at a constant hot temperature. The State Bath House in the park moderates that water to a therapeutic 104 degrees and charges nothing to bathe. Legend Rock, a petroglyph site about 25 miles away, is also part of the park.
The Rainbow Terraces of Hot Springs State Park, seen across the Bighorn River. Hot water spilled straight over the travertine in 1914. It runs through pipes and channels today, and algae has painted the terraces orange and yellow.
Drag to compare.
1914: A. G. Lucier, Library of Congress, public domain. 2014: Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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 Thermopolis 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
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the northeast.
- Highest ground nearby
- 315 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 11% 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.
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Thermopolis Hot Springs is road-accessible, so you can bring more gear. The water runs hot, so extra hydration is key.
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