Horse Creek Hot Springs

Backcountry soak: Horse Creek Hot Springs is a real, public, Forest Service soak, reached by a long summer-only forest road. This page records what the registries and the Forest Service document, and flags the one thing nobody has settled, the campground fee.

Horse Creek Hot Springs is the high one: a documented soak at about 6,000 feet on the Idaho Montana divide, at the head of the Horse Creek drainage in Lemhi County, roughly 13 air miles northwest of Shoup. The federal thermal springs list carries it at a maximum of 109 °F on the Painted Rocks Lake quadrangle, and the U.S. Geological Survey sampled it in August 1980 for its Idaho Batholith study, measuring 102.2 °F at the vent.

A small wooden bathhouse stands over the main pool, two smaller pools catch the outflow below it, and the Salmon-Challis National Forest runs a dispersed campground beside the springs and publishes the drive in. Of the springs in the federal record along this stretch of the divide, this is the one people actually soak in, and the Forest Service page, the soaking guides, and forty years of registry entries all agree that it is there to be soaked in.

Read the temperatures on this page the way the record gives them. The 109 °F figure is a registry maximum from the survey era; the water a visitor meets is the measured kind, right around 102 °F, which happens to be the temperature most soakers would pick on purpose. The site is summer country: the forest roads that reach it, from North Fork in Idaho or from the West Fork of the Bitterroot in Montana, are snowbound until early summer and close again with the first lasting snow.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

Two drives reach the springs, and both are summer drives. From Idaho, the Forest Service’s own directions run from North Fork: west 14 miles on Forest Road 030, north 8 miles on Forest Road 038, and 14 miles northwest on Forest Roads 044 and 065, 36 miles of forest road in all. From Montana, the West Fork Road (State Highway 473) runs about 31 miles south from Conner past Painted Rocks Lake, then Woods Creek Road climbs roughly 6 or 7 miles to the Woods Creek Pass area.

The Montana route keeps to the West Fork corridor then east on Woods Creek Road; the Idaho route threads a string of Forest Service and unnumbered campground roads through the Horse Creek drainage. Both stay open only when the snow lets them. Summit Lake and Horse Creek Pass on the approach stand between 6,600 and 7,400 feet, and soaking guides use the roads from July into October and ask the Forest Service about them otherwise.

Getting there is not the same as getting in. At the end of the forest roads stands a campground, a restroom and the bathhouse; there is no trail to hike or parking pass in question beyond it. This is a driving route, not a trailhead route, and the barriers are roadbed, snow and grade, not permission. Camping is at the site, so the pools are beside the camping.

The campground is a dispersed site of about 10 people, and the pools are a handful of steps away. At the springs the bathhouse, the restroom and the campground put the visitor among the pool, not in a parking area further out.

Access Notes

No slot is assigned to this spring. The campground and the pools are open to their users, and the bathhouse is open to all campers and day users who make the drive. The only need is to arrive in the snow-free months and leave no waste in the water, and to carry cash for a fee in case a campground rate appears later.

Because the campground has no potable water, the visitor should bring drinking water and should expect no picnic tables or fire rings. The Forest Service lists a restroom but no picnic tables, and no potable water is available.