Weatherby Hot Spring

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

Weatherby Hot Spring appears in the federal thermal springs list at 113 °F, in the Phifer Creek drainage of Elmore County, west of Atlanta, on the Phifer Creek quadrangle. The U.S. Geological Survey’s GEOTHERM file carries the same spring as record 0025134 in Township 6 North, Range 10 East, Section 30, at the same 45 °C.

The state geothermal dataset carries it too, from a USGS sampling the registries date to September 1981: a seepage-type spring with a recorded discharge, a use listed in 1980 as unused, and a hotter reading, 122.0 °F, that the body of this page sets beside the federal figure rather than over it. Three registries, one section, one spring, and no account anywhere of anyone soaking in it.

Read this page as a documentation record for a real, sampled spring in some of Idaho’s best hot spring country, not as a destination guide. The Atlanta corridor around it is full of documented soaks, and the Weatherby name itself belongs to a visited corridor soak in local guide use. But for this inventoried vent, no pool, development, or visit is described in any source consulted, no agency manages it as a recreation site, and the survey party that measured it wrote down “unused.” That is the whole honest picture, and this listing does not dress it up.

One neighbor note, because the names tangle here: the bathtub and shower rinse on Phifer Creek is listed separately on this site as Phifer Warm Spring, a different listing with its own water and its own story. This page covers only the hotter registry spring recorded under the Weatherby Hot Spring name.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

The spring’s inventory point sits in the Phifer Creek drainage, a tributary valley on the north side of the Middle Fork Boise River, roughly 10 to 11 miles west of Atlanta in a straight line. This is the Atlanta corridor: a long forest-road drive up the Middle Fork from Highway 21, mining-era settlements, National Forest campgrounds, and more documented hot springs per mile than almost anywhere else in Idaho.

Phifer Creek Road climbs out of the corridor toward Trinity Ridge, and the country is at its best, and mostly at its only accessible, in the snow-free months; Josh’s standing read on this corridor, from his own time on it, is that Middle Fork Boise springs are seasonal, with Summer and Fall the ideal seasons.

Beyond the corridor, this listing deliberately does not go. No published route to the spring itself exists, no source describes a visit to the inventoried vent, and the land status of its section is not confirmed in any source consulted.

A corridor guide tradition does attach the Weatherby name to a soak that a creek ford gates until late summer runoff drops, which says the name is a living one on this river; it does not say the soaked-in water is this vent, and this page does not claim it is. Anyone with a genuine reason to visit should establish land ownership first and, if the land is private, get the landowner’s permission.

Is There a Soak Here?

At the inventoried spring, no source describes one. The state dataset calls it a seepage-type spring and preserves the 1980 use note “unused”; no soaking guide describes a Weatherby pool, and no trip report or photograph tied to this vent exists in any source consulted. The aggregator pages that carry its name repeat the registry row and nothing more.

Whether the spring still surfaces as it did in 1981 is not verified anywhere, and whether the corridor’s Weatherby soak tradition belongs to this water or to a neighboring one is an open question the build file flags for the site owner’s firsthand knowledge. If a field report, a land record, or a credible corridor account ever settles it, this page will be updated.

History

The spring’s written record is a survey record, and a genuinely two-sided one. Ross-era and Mitchell-era state geothermal work carried the Phifer Creek country into the state inventory by 1980, with the use of this spring written down as unused and its earlier survey position later corrected within Section 30. In September 1981 a USGS sampling reached it, the visit behind both the state dataset’s 122.0 °F figure and its discharge reading, while the federal list and the GEOTHERM file held the cooler 113 °F figure from the same survey era.

Two federal numbers for one spring, nine degrees apart, both still standing in the record: this page prints both rather than picking a winner the sources do not pick. The Weatherby name itself is older Atlanta corridor stock, a mill and family name preserved up the drainage in the Weatherby Mill record, but no source consulted ties a specific mill, person, or structure to this spring, and this listing does not invent the connection. After 1981 the record simply stops, which is its own kind of history for a hot spring a few miles from some of the most visited soaks in the state.

Nearby Hot Springs

The nearest listing on this site is Phifer Warm Spring, the Phifer Creek bathtub and shower rinse, a separate listing and a separate water from the registry spring on this page. East along the corridor, Atlanta Hot Springs and Chattanooga Hot Springs are the area’s documented pooled soaks, and Queens River Hot Springs, about 6.75 miles east, is a documentation record like this one. More South-Central Idaho hot springs →