Geothermal heat map of US hot springs | Hacker News Reader

Geothermal heat map of US hot springs

soakingsprings.com

116 pointsarmenarmen40 comments

A couple years back I drove from Vegas to Yosemite. Due to a road closure we had to take a 4 hour detour. We had this colourful van from Escape Campervans, and every night looked at freecampsites.net to find a free place to sleep. Nice adventures.

That night around 8pm we drove to a random pick, called Willy's Hot Springs, very tired and hungry. We had no idea what it was and had never been to a hot springs. After confirming we could stay there, we drove for dinner and a beer at Mammoth. When we got back, we were curious and went along the wooden path to see the hot springs.

It was around midnight, there was no moon and 0 light pollution. It was magical. You sit in the cold night in natural hot water, in the middle of pretty barren country. There's all the stars and the milky way. Then all of a sudden it got pretty bright. The moon rose over the horizon. It was the first and only moonrise I've ever seen.

This was the most magical night in nature I've ever experienced. A friend of mine said "oh, Willy's Hot Springs, I've been there too, it was kind of mid." I think we experience the world in different ways.

I considered adding a dark skies layer for this very reason!

Similar experience at the Arizona Hot Springs, we sat in there nestled between a slot canyon as the sunset and the moon came out. Magical. One of the most memorable experiences of my life.

The hours-long hike back through the desert in the dark of night though, kinda scary. Felt like we were walking on Mars.

Ha - I live on the East Coast and had never been to a hot spring in my life until last week, on a road trip in California. It was Wild Willy's. Your night visit sounds wonderful, but our late afternoon stop was beautiful too. Blissful scenery all around.

Probably mid because he went there at 5 pm on a Saturday and there were 40 people in that tiny pool haha

> It was the first and only moonrise I've ever seen.

I went camping in the middle of nowhere to watch a meteor shower, and while the shower was very active, the moonrise was the "star" of the show. Incredible experience.

Just spent my birthday weekend down at Travertine Hot Springs in CA. Beautiful, well maintained, and free. https://www.soakingsprings.com/hot-springs/california/traver...

Some of these locations near me are really poorly researched and described.

eg, Garland Mineral Springs is primarily located on private land, and was destroyed by flooding and river avulsion. The entry carries a name of a specific researcher, but the description is obviously LLM generated.

https://www.soakingsprings.com/hot-springs/washington/garlan... https://garlandmineralsprings.com/

Yeah, I spent a few minutes poking around the springs in Northern Nevada I’m familiar with, and completely agree with your assessment. This is slop.

There are some weird mistakes too, like for San Antonio hot spring in NM the coordinates are right but the county is wrong. Seems like that should be an easy thing to automate using GIS.

I think it's funny that the volcanic fumaroles are listed. On one hand, yes, they're certainly active geothermal sites. On the other hand, the page is tailored to hot springs.

Average temp: 250F above ambient. Status: Open for soaking. Note: Please don't soak.

Well, the ones on the summits of Hood and Rainier are just so readily accessible that it'd be a shame not to dip your toesies in.

I think it's missing some. There are a couple of hotsprings off the highway between Ventura and Ojai. They're 'wild' and completely natural - you can make your own pools using rocks and sand for dams. I saw Steven Spielberg once when I was there with a few people - he was reminiscing with another guy about the problems they had filming something...

Edit: I think it was empire of the sun. They were talking about how difficult it was to film explosions in Japan.

Maybe you’re thinking of Letters from Iwo Jima? They shot on location but the island is basically a mass war grave so they couldn’t use much pyrotechnics to avoid disturbing the ground.

Empire of the Sun was mostly shot in Shanghai and Spain. That was the one where they got fined for burning old tires for the special effect smoke, which dumped a bunch of toxic smoke on Shanghai.

Yeah I don't know what movie it was - just that the topic was explosions in Japan.

Be sure to double/triple check before going.

More than one of these listed was clearly on private property but the listing had no mention.

Quinn hot springs [1] in Montana being one. It is listed as "roadside" with "camping nearby" but in reality it is a paid resort on private property.

[1]https://glaciermt.com/listing/quinns-hot-springs-resort

I found several of these as well.

In a similar vein I made a site to check local water quality and swimming conditions in the Bay Area. https://bayswimcheck.com/

The Eastern Sierra Hot Springs are goated. Definitely worth a trip out there just for that.

> In a similar vein I made a site to check local water quality and swimming conditions in the Bay Area.

Not to rain on anyone's parade here, but if we have to check the results on the official agency postings anyway instead of relying on what you put on the website, what's the point of the website in the first place? Kind of feels like either own up to that you get the data import right, or don't bother at all. Maybe I miss the point though?

Edit: I just tried a random example, https://bayswimcheck.com/beaches/lake-del-valle/ which links to https://www.ebparks.org/recreation/swimming/del-valle#monito... and your page says "Good to swim today" while the official website has posted a Caution Advisory.

Hey Armen how accurate is this? That’s a lot of spots to research. I read a bit about your process but you aren’t physically verifying in person so still room for significant error? Pretty cool / helpful though still, thank you!

Sad to see how lacking the East Coast is in hotsprings…

The "Best Time to Visit" thing needs more stringent criteria. It lists "midwinter" for both the listings in NY and in MA, presumably for the biggest temperature differential. Unfortunately, the springs are "well below bath temperature" and it will be literally freezing outside in January.

I have a bit of an obsession with trying to find hot springs. Washington state, for all of its mountains, is relatively devoid of hot springs. I feel like there must be some that remain unknown. I'd like to someday use a thermal camera on a drone of some kind to try and find one :) Maybe go along fault lines that have other hot springs?

Thanks to the DOGE/Trump goverment cutbacks, the previous government listed data was pulled offline. I've got a full copy of the data (much of it is out of date), but I haven't had the time to build a site and put it online. Might get around to it at some point. I'll probably reach out to the guy running the site and see if he wants the data.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HotSpringsWest/comments/1jwc8ga/nce...

I'm interested! Could be a fun project.

Why not post it on github? Because federal government data cannot be copyrighted, anyone is free to copy, redistribute, mirror, modify, or publish it anywhere they choose.

Do'it! :)

Oy. Checked a couple of these I know personally. You'll find yourself in a world of trespassing if you use this.

Same here. I wouldn't go traipsing through the woods looking for a spring at a set of coordinates without first finding out who the landowner is and contacting them for permission. (If it's not public land.)

In one case I found, the USGS point for the spring is on public land, but the actual spring is on a private inholding. This, of course, led to an error that caused the site to list it as "public."

Are they still shown when you select the 'Open to public filter'?

Does anyone know how this was made, and if it would be possible to make one for Canada?

I’m a bit of a hot spring nut, having been to well over 100 wilderness ones, including a few that less than 5 people have been to in ~100 years.

I’m always on the hunt for new ways to find unknown or rumoured ones.

Definitely a few missing from this map. Nothing better than soaking under the stars.

No Wisconsin where we need it most :(

*Not the fault of soakingsprings.com but just pointing it out in case anyone wants to upload one previously not mentioned :)

Super cool

It is, in fact, the opposite :)

Missing all the hot springs in the Black Hills, South Dakota.

There's the town of Hot Springs.

They've commercialized the heck out of it. All the streams on public land have been dynamited (or so I was told), and there's the commercial facility that charges around $20 for a soak. That's South Dakota for you.

ok, now do the rest of the world, and add layers for cold springs, artesian sources, mineral waters, salt, other, and drop it on OSM best one I ever saw(was in) was somewhere in oregon, inland , vast vocanic pumice plains with pine trees, and an intensly cold spiring comming up in a head pond strong enough to create a big dome of water you can swim into and freeze your ass of, and then get out in a hot desert. our planet has a bunch of awsome and decidedly odd features, which luckily have not ALL been exploited , comodified, and privatized.

why only half the map has any points visible? am i getting something odd or just geology?

Toggle the Geothermal Heat Flow button in top right and you'll see why.

Because half of the US is geologically dead.

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