Blackfoot Reservoir Warm Spring

Documentation record: Blackfoot Reservoir Warm Spring has no verified public access information and no documented pool. This page records what the official geothermal registries say about the spring, and nothing beyond it.

Blackfoot Reservoir Warm Spring is a warm spring that lives in the registries. It appears in the federal thermal springs list at 72 °F, on the western shore of Blackfoot Reservoir in Caribou County, and in the U.S. Geological Survey’s GEOTHERM file at 23 °C (about 73 °F), placed in T6S R41E Sec 1. Two independent registries agree on the spring, its temperature, and its position to the section. What neither records is any recreational thread at all: no pool, no visit, no access description, no photograph of the water being used.

The reservoir around it is well documented. Blackfoot Dam, completed in 1911 and operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, impounds the Blackfoot River for flood control and irrigation storage, primarily for the Fort Hall Indian Reservation, and the reservoir is a working irrigation lake with BLM-managed campgrounds on its shoreline. The spring on its west shore has attracted surveyors and scientists rather than swimmers. Read this page as a documentation record for a real, inventoried spring, not as a destination guide.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

Blackfoot Reservoir fills a broad basin on the Blackfoot River northeast of Soda Springs, ringed by sagebrush hills and reservoir shoreline. The spring’s inventory point sits on the western shore at the reservoir’s north end, in T6S R41E Sec 1, at the reservoir’s full-pool edge. That position carries an honest uncertainty: at full pool the emergence may sit at or below the waterline, and at low water it may stand on exposed shore. No field report, agency page, or visitor account settles which, and this listing does not pretend otherwise.

Beyond that, this listing deliberately does not go. No published route to the spring exists, no agency presents it as a place to visit, and whether the shoreline parcel it rises on is federal, tribal-program, or private land is not confirmed in any source. The coordinates are a matter of public record in the federal list and the GEOTHERM file linked above, but a set of coordinates is not an invitation, and on land of unconfirmed ownership it is not permission. Anyone with a genuine reason to visit should establish land ownership and, if the land is private, get the landowner’s permission first.

Is There a Soak Here?

The honest answer is that the record does not describe one, and the temperature argues against it. At 72 °F the source water is tepid rather than hot, well below the temperature of an unheated soak. No pool is documented in any source, and the people who have written about this reservoir’s warm water wrote as scientists: the Blackfoot Reservoir area was one of the geothermal areas selected for state study in the 1970s (Mitchell, “Geothermal Investigations in Idaho, Part 6,” Idaho Department of Water Resources, 1977), and a 1985 geochemistry study sampled fifty springs across the region. Those works treat the area’s springs as geothermal study sites, and neither is shown to have sampled or described this particular spring as a bathing place. If a landowner confirmation, a parcel record, or a credible field report ever surfaces, this page will be updated.

History

The spring enters the written record through the geothermal surveys of the 1970s and 1980s. It was carried in the U.S. Geological Survey’s GEOTHERM compilation (record 0025207) at 23 °C, and it rides in the federal thermal springs list at 72 °F. The state geothermal dataset, notably, has no record for it at all: the two federal threads are the whole file. Around the spring, the reservoir itself has the longer documented history, dammed in 1911 by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and studied as part of one of southeastern Idaho’s most examined geothermal areas. Nothing else is recorded for the spring itself: no resort era, no structure, no account of a visit, and no explanation of a name beyond the reservoir it sits beside.

Nearby Hot Springs

There is no other documented soak on Blackfoot Reservoir, and no live listing yet in Caribou County. The nearest documentation record is Brockman Creek Hot Spring in Bonneville County, another inventoried warm spring known from the datasets. For actual soaking in this corner of Idaho, the developed springs are southwest in the Preston and Lava Hot Springs country, where listings like Maple Grove Hot Springs and Bear River Hot Springs offer real pools and public hours. More South-East Idaho hot springs →