Owl Creek Hot Springs

Documentation record: Owl Creek Hot Springs rises on private land, where soaking has long been tolerated but is not a public right. This page records what the official registries and the documented visits say, and states the access position exactly as it stands.

Owl Creek Hot Springs is the hot end of the Shoup country: a system of vents and seeps at 122 °F in the federal thermal springs list, steaming out of cracks in the cliffs of Owl Creek Canyon, a Salmon River tributary in Lemhi County. The U.S. Geological Survey measured 51 °C (123.8 °F) at the vents in 1980, and the state geothermal dataset preserves the full survey-era picture, several vents and numerous seeps spanning 45 to 51 °C.

At the base of the cliffs, visitors have for decades dug and rebuilt small sand and gravel pools that soak at about 106 to 110 °F. All of it sits on private ground: an 82 acre property of patented mining claims, an old mining inholding wrapped in Salmon-Challis National Forest, reached by about 2.5 miles of National Forest trail from the Salmon River Road.

Read the access part of this page carefully, because it is the part that matters. The owners of this parcel have historically allowed hikers to walk in and soak, and no source records that welcome being withdrawn. There is also no public easement, no agency-managed access, and no guarantee, and the property was listed for sale in 2026, which means the welcome itself is on the market with everything else. This listing documents the spring and honors the tolerance it has been shown. It does not extend an invitation the site cannot extend.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

The only way in is the Owl Creek Trail, a National Forest trail that leaves the Salmon River Road where Owl Creek meets the river and follows the canyon upstream for about 2.5 miles. A 1986 geology thesis describes that trail as the spring’s only access, and nothing since has changed it: there is no road to Owl Creek Hot Springs, and there never has been in the record.

The trail is under-maintained and fire-damaged in stretches, with washouts and downed trees reported by the most recent documented party, and near the top of the walk the route crosses onto the private parcel. The pools sit on the far side of the creek from the trail, at the base of the steaming cliffs a few hundred yards past the old cabin site, and they are easy to walk past without seeing.

The season is set by the creek. Every spring, runoff submerges the pools and tears at the trail; the pools are typically rebuilt and soakable from late June or early July, once the water drops, through the fall. A magazine party soaked in early November and found the main pool, about the size of a normal bathtub, at a perfect temperature. Winter access is a snow-season walk in a cold canyon and no source documents it as a practiced season.

And the standing warning bears repeating in plain terms: this is private land, the public use of it is a tolerance and not a right, the parcel was listed for sale in August 2026 at $599,000 and remained on the market at that price in November 2026, and a new owner could end the tolerance at any time. Anyone who goes should leave the place exactly as found, pack out everything, and be ready to turn around if the situation on the ground has changed.

Is There a Soak Here?

Yes, a small and handmade one, documented across forty years. The old soaking guide describes several springs, 95 to 125 °F, emerging from cracks in the steep rock cliffs, their water gathered into two-person sand and gravel pools at the cliff base, with a strainer rigged at one pool as a shower and creek water bucketed in to cool them.

The newest documented visit, a magazine overnight trip published in 2024, found the same arrangement still working: a bathtub-sized main pool at a seeping, steaming cliff, smaller pools at other seeps along the creek, and a creek-level pool running too cool at high water. The pools are rebuilt by whoever comes, out of sand, gravel, and rock, after every runoff, which means their number and exact spots shift year to year. It is a bushwhacker’s soak at the end of a rough trail on somebody else’s land, and every part of that sentence is load-bearing.

History

The documented history starts with the surveys, as it usually does in this country. Ross noted the occurrence in the state Bureau of Mines and Geology’s 1971 geothermal pamphlet. Mitchell’s survey crews recorded the vent field in 1980, the range of 45 to 51 °C that the state dataset still carries, and Young’s USGS Idaho Batholith study measured the system the same year at 51 °C.

The geology got its own thesis: Owl Creek is one of the three systems of the Shoup Geothermal Area, its vents rising along a minor reverse fault in a shear zone in ancient Precambrian rock, beside a plug of quartz latite porphyry, with the water’s deep equilibration estimated at 127 °C some 2.4 kilometers down. The federal mineral database files the place as a geothermal occurrence with no production recorded, which is the quiet official summary: a real spring system, in a canyon the miners prospected, that never became a mine of consequence.

The livelier version of the story belongs to the current sellers, and it is printed here as their account, not as established fact. In the listing’s telling, two miners, Reuben Joseph and Elmer Groff, came into Owl Creek Canyon in 1896, found gold veins beside the steaming springs, patented their claims, and over twenty years built a two-story cabin, shops, a waterwheel and flume, and a water-powered arrastra, with a small bathhouse and a clawfoot tub for soaking after shifts underground; the listing also claims an 1892 decreed water right for recreational use.

None of that narrative is corroborated in any source consulted for this page, and one piece of it does not fit itself: a water right decreed in 1892 predates the 1896 settlement it is attached to, so if the right exists it began with somebody earlier.

What is solid is the outline the story hangs on: patented claims were taken in this canyon, a cabin stood by the trail for generations of guidebooks to navigate by, and Forest Service staff report that cabin burned in a forest fire, leaving the flat site and rusted tin that mark the spot today. A Lemhi County history series has a volume on Big Owl Creek in preparation; until it or another record surfaces, the 1896 story stays where this page puts it, in the sellers’ frame.

Nearby Hot Springs

The nearest full listing is Panther Hot Springs, about 7 straight-line miles southeast across the canyon country, a documented Salmon River corridor soak on public land. North about 11 miles, in the same Shoup country, is Horse Creek Hot Springs, the Forest Service bathhouse soak on the divide, documented on its own page. More East-Central Idaho hot springs →