Barney Hot Springs

Warm pond record: Barney Hot Springs is a documented public warm pond at about 6,400 feet, warm rather than hot at 82 to 83 °F, with a famous fish story and no current conditions source. This page records what the registries, the BLM, the local histories, and one very good fish study document, and flags what nobody has verified, starting with who owns the pond parcel.

Barney Hot Springs is the warm pond at the top of the Little Lost River country: a sand and gravel pond in the Summit Creek valley, in the headwaters of the Little Lost River drainage between the Lemhi Range and the Lost River Range, at about 6,400 feet. The federal thermal springs list carries it at a maximum of 82 °F on the Gilmore quadrangle, and the state geothermal survey measured 28.5 °C, about 83 °F, in the record that runs back to Waring’s 1965 survey. The Bureau of Land Management runs a small campground across the road and names Barney on its own page for that site as the neighbor attraction.

A square log frame stands in the middle of the pond where the water runs about 4 feet deep, the Barney family once kept a swimming and bath house here, and for decades the warm water has held a community of released tropical fish unlike anything else in Idaho, documented in 2021 in the Western North American Naturalist. Read the pond the way the record gives it: a warm, waist deep, fish filled desert pond at the end of a long dirt road, not a hot soak.

Two honest flags belong up front. The pond parcel’s ownership is not verified in any source consulted: public use is documented and longstanding, and no source reports the pond posted or fee based, but no source names its owner either. And nobody speaks for the pond’s current conditions: the newest firm evidence is a 2021 fish paper and a 2026 visitor video, and recent reports of the water itself disagree with each other.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

The working approach is the Little Lost River valley. The National Park Service’s camping guide gives the drive to the BLM recreation site across the road from the pond: from Howe, 40 miles northwest on the county road, then 9.5 miles northeast on Summit Road.

The last stretch and the valley roads generally are graded dirt and gravel; the soaking guide tradition calls the pond a drive up at the roadside, and a 2026 visitor video shows a vehicle parked at the shore and a swimmer in the water. Gilmore and Leadore, on the Lemhi River side, are the near neighbors over Gilmore Summit to the northeast, about 13 straight line miles away in Gilmore’s case, but the valley road from Howe is the approach the federal directions describe.

The season question is thinner than the guide tradition admits. The guides list the pond as accessible year round, and the recreation site across the road is a year round BLM site in its own listings, but the pond stands at about 6,400 feet in high desert valley country, no source verifies winter road conditions, and snow is a real factor in this valley for months of the year.

Treat year round as a guide claim, carry chains and a full tank in the cold months, and do not count on company: even in summer this is some of the emptiest settled country in east central Idaho. There is no camping at the pond itself in the guide tradition; the BLM campground across the road, with picnic tables and vault toilets, is the overnight option.

The Soak

Set expectations by the thermometer first: at 82 to 83 °F this water is a warm pond, closer to a spring fed lake than to a hot spring soak, and on a hot desert day that is exactly its charm. Warm water bubbles up through the sand and gravel bottom all over the pond, the depth runs to about 4 feet around the square log frame standing in the middle, and the outflow slips away south as Barney Creek.

What the frame is, nobody has settled: one story calls it an old corral from before the spring was dammed into a pond, another calls it the last of the old bathhouse that stood over the water, and local memory recorded by the guides recalls swimming under that house as children in the 1940s.

The fish are part of the soak now, like it or not: released tropical fish share the pond, recent visitor reports of clarity and quality disagree with each other (one modern aggregator calls the water murky and the pond no longer ideal for soaking; a 2026 visitor praised it), and the honest summary is a wild, waist deep warm pond with fish in it, in a huge empty valley under the Lemhi Range.

The Fish

Barney’s second life is the best documented thing about it. Local tradition, recorded by Idaho Magazine, holds that townspeople released unwanted aquarium fish in the warm pond over many years, and the warmth let tropical species do in Idaho what they can do almost nowhere else in the state: survive winter and breed.

A Brigham Young University Idaho study, published in 2021 in the Western North American Naturalist, censused the pond in 2017 and estimated 12,043 fish: green swordtails at 68 percent, zebra mbuna at 20 percent, convict cichlids at 9 percent, and Mozambique tilapia at 3 percent, with tropical fish found in Barney Creek only within 800 meters of the spring before the cold water stopped them. In March 2018 a rain on snow flood ran through the pond and killed fish in numbers; the Nature Conservancy’s account of a return visit found the tropical species apparently gone and cold tolerant goldfish dominant, with later visitors reporting other fish reappearing.

What lives in the pond today is not verified by any source consulted. The pond even has a monster in the local telling, one large purple fish called Barney who is said to like small swimmers; that is folklore, printed here as folklore, and it is the liveliest naming story any spring in this program carries.

History

The human record here is a valley record. Idaho Magazine’s community history of the Little Lost River Valley places the Barney family a few miles down from the Swauger ranch at the top of Summit Creek: the family “erected buildings and a very nice swimming and bath house at a natural warm spring,” and the place settled into valley life as a swimming hole.

The valley’s community history book adds the working side: in cattle drive recollections, Grandpa Peck’s place at Barney Hot Springs was a regular overnight stop for riders moving herds through the headwaters. No dates attach to either occupancy in the sources consulted, and no resort, hotel, or commercial operation is documented at any period; the bathhouse is the development peak, and by the time the soaking guides arrived it survived, if at all, as the log frame in the pond and in the memory of swimming under it in the 1940s.

The spring enters the scientific record through Waring’s 1965 USGS survey, is inventoried by the state in 1973 at 28.5 °C in Quaternary alluvium, and then largely leaves the written record until the fish made it famous in a small way: first as a local curiosity, then as a journal paper. That is the whole documented history, a family bathhouse, a cattle drive bunk stop, and an accidental tropical aquarium, and it is enough.

Nearby Hot Springs

The nearest full listing is Challis Hot Springs, a developed Salmon River resort about 40 straight line miles northwest, the polished opposite of Barney in every way. West across the ranges, Sullivan Hot Springs is another Custer County record documented on its own page. More East-Central Idaho hot springs →