Pescadero Warm Spring

Documentation record: Pescadero 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.

Pescadero Warm Spring appears in the federal thermal springs list at 79 °F, in the Nounan valley of Bear Lake County, northwest of Montpelier. The U.S. Geological Survey’s GEOTHERM file carries the same spring twice, in the same township and section, under two spellings: “Pescadero (Bear River) Warm Springs” and, in a misspelled duplicate row, “Pescadaro Warm Springs.” Both rows give the same temperature, 26 °C, the federal figure exactly. One spring, two registry rows, and a name that belonged to a place before it belonged to the water.

Read this page as a documentation record for a real, inventoried spring in private ranch country, not as a destination guide. No pool, development, visit, or public access is documented anywhere for Pescadero Warm Spring, and no agency manages it as a recreation site. Its value is the record itself: a warm spring the federal surveyors wrote down twice, in a valley that has since gone quiet about it.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

The spring’s inventory point sits in the Nounan valley, where the Bear River runs through the farm and ranch country northwest of Montpelier, on the corridor served by Pescadero Road. It is a settled, working landscape, and the valley floor is private land. The fuller GEOTHERM name, “Pescadero (Bear River) Warm Springs,” ties the spring to the river, but whether the vent surfaces in the river itself, a side channel, or a spring run on the valley floor is not verified in any source consulted.

One modern lead deserves printing, framed exactly as what it is. A large ranch listed for sale on Pescadero Road in 2025 and 2026, the Tanner Ranch, advertises numerous springs, including a warm spring that stays unfrozen year round. That is the same road corridor and the same scarce feature as the inventoried spring, and the ranch is the most likely modern holder of the vent. It is not verified that the ranch’s warm spring is the federal Pescadero Warm Spring, and this listing does not state the match as fact. Beyond that, this listing deliberately does not go: no published route to the spring exists, and the coordinates in the registries linked above are public record, but a set of coordinates is not an invitation, and on private land it is not permission. Anyone with a genuine reason to visit should establish land ownership and get the landowner’s permission first.

Is There a Soak Here?

The honest answer is that no source describes one. No soaking guide covers this spring, no trip report or photograph of a visit exists in any source consulted, and no agency page presents it as a place to go. At 79 °F the source water is warm rather than hot, the temperature of a spring a ranch valley would use quietly, for stock water that never freezes, rather than a bathing place, and nothing suggests it was ever developed as one. If a landowner confirmation, a parcel record, or a credible field report ever surfaces, this page will be updated.

History

The name comes first. Pescadero is a historic Bear Lake County locality, carried in the federal place file and listed in the Business Atlas and Shippers’ Guide of 1895 with a railroad station and an express office, and no post office: the profile of a small rail siding community in the Bear River corridor. It appears on 1970s USGS mapping of the Nounan and Bear River country, which is also the mapping the spring’s own registry entries rest on. Who applied the name to the siding, and why, is not verified in any source consulted, and this listing prints no origin story for it.

The spring itself enters the written record through the geothermal surveys. The federal list carries Pescadero Warm Spring at 79 °F on the Nounan quadrangle, and GEOTHERM holds it twice (records 0025148 and 0081045), the duplicate row preserving a misspelling, “Pescadaro,” that no one corrected. One related record is deliberately kept out of this page: an unnamed spring southeast of Pescadero (GEOTHERM record 0025147, 68 °F) is a separate entry about two miles away. No settler story, resort era, or local account attaches to the Pescadero spring in anything the research found; the two registry rows and the siding’s name are the whole file.

Nearby Hot Springs

The nearest full listing is Bear Lake Hot Springs, a developed resort spring at the north end of Bear Lake about 14 miles south, published on this site as “Epic Hot Springs.” It is a different spring entirely, much hotter water (118 °F) with pools and public hours, and none of its facilities belong to this record; it is simply the closest place in Bear Lake County where a soak is actually on offer. More South-East Idaho hot springs →