Ashton Warm Spring

Documentation record: Ashton Warm Spring has no verified public access information and no documented pool, and its sources disagree on its temperature. This page records what the official geothermal registries say about the spring, and nothing beyond it.

Ashton Warm Spring appears in the federal thermal springs list at 79 °F, a little over a mile north of Ashton in Fremont County, and it has been in the thermal literature a long time: the Idaho Department of Water Resources’ Water Information Bulletin No. 30 inventories “Ashton Warm Springs” at T9N R42E Sec 23, citing Stearns and others, 1939. But the 79 °F figure does not survive contact with the USGS field record. A USGS sampling program measured this spring at 41 °C, which is 106 °F, and the GEOTHERM index carries the same 41. This listing prints that conflict plainly rather than picking a winner, because the sources do not agree and no pool exists whose temperature could settle it.

Read this page as a documentation record for a real, inventoried spring, not as a destination guide. No pool, development, commercial use, visit, or public access is documented anywhere for Ashton Warm Spring, in eighty-five years of record. Its value is the record itself, and the honest puzzle inside it.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

The inventory point plots about a mile and a third north of Ashton, in the farm country of the upper Snake River plain between Ashton and the Fall River and Henry’s Fork bottoms, at the edge of the Pleistocene basalt country that Water Information Bulletin No. 30 describes for this site. It is settled agricultural land, not public backcountry, and no agency manages this spring as a recreation site.

Beyond that, this listing deliberately does not go. No published route to the spring exists, no source describes a visit, and ownership of the section the spring rises in is not confirmed in any source consulted. The position is a matter of public record in the registries 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 no source describes one, in a record that now runs more than eighty-five years. No soaking guide covers this spring, no trip report or photograph of a visit exists in any source consulted, and the aggregator pages that carry its name repeat the registry row and nothing more. The people who wrote about this water wrote as scientists: a USGS drainage study sampled it for chemistry, alongside thirty other waters. If a landowner confirmation, a county record, or a credible field report ever surfaces, this page will be updated.

The Temperature Conflict

Two numbers attach to this spring, and they cannot both describe the same vent at the same time. The first is 79 °F (26 °C), printed by the federal thermal springs list and repeated by every aggregator that copies it; the research traces its lineage to the Waring (1965) and Stearns-era record. The second is 41 °C (106 °F), and it comes from measurement: the USGS Teton River area study (Open-File Report 79-687, Crosthwaite, 1979) sampled this spring, site 9N-42E-23DAC1S, and lists its discharge temperature as 41 °C, and the GEOTHERM index independently carries 41 for the same record. A spring can present several vents at different temperatures, and which vent each party measured is not verified; the older figure may also simply be wrong, carried forward by decades of copying. One related figure should not be mistaken for a spring temperature: the same study’s silica geothermometer estimate of 145 °C is a modeled estimate for the deep aquifer, not a measurement of water at the surface. This listing’s position is the one the evidence supports: “warm” is the registry’s word in the spring’s name, the field measurement says hot at source, and no settled temperature is printed because none exists.

History

The spring enters the written record with Stearns and others’ 1939 thermal inventory of Idaho, and every later record carries that entry forward. The state inventory, Water Information Bulletin No. 30 (Young and Mitchell, 1973), lists “Ashton Warm Springs” under Fremont County in a Pleistocene basalt setting. The USGS thermal-water compilation covering 1921 to 1991 (Open-File Report 92-175) holds the site as 9N-42E-23DAC1S, and GEOTHERM holds it as record 0081153. Across more than eight decades the spring is always an inventory entry and never a developed site: no resort era, no structure, no account of a visit. The registries are the whole file, and this listing prints them as they stand.

Nearby Hot Springs

The nearest documentation record is Brockman Creek Hot Spring, another inventoried Fremont County spring known from the datasets rather than from visits. Neither of the region’s commercial soaks, Green Canyon near Newdale and Heise west of Ririe, has a listing on this site yet, and both are separate springs whose facts do not belong to this record. More South-East Idaho hot springs →