Condie Hot Springs

Documentation record: Condie Hot Springs is on private land and has no public access. This page records what the official inventories, a state ecology study, and the spring’s own history say about it. It is not a visitor guide, and there is no trip to plan around this spring.

Condie Hot Springs is the strongest water in this corner of Idaho that almost nobody has ever soaked in. It rises from Quaternary basalt in the Little Wood River drainage west of Carey, in Blaine County, recorded at 124 °F in the federal thermal springs list and carried in the Idaho Department of Water Resources geothermal dataset. A 1930 county history counted it among Blaine County’s bathing springs, and geothermal researchers were still sampling its open-air pools in 2014.

Through all of that, one fact never changes: the spring is privately owned, and no source at any date documents public access to it. Read this page as the record of a real, hot, historically noted spring that belongs to its landowner, not to the soaking public.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

Condie Hot Springs belongs to the line of thermal springs along the Little Wood River, in the basalt country west of Carey where the river leaves the hills for the Camas Prairie side of Blaine County. The federal and state inventories plot it there, the state ecology study ties it to Carey as its nearest town, and the 2014 sampling team recorded it at about 4,800 feet elevation.

That is as specific as this listing gets, deliberately. The land is private, the spring has no public access, and a set of coordinates is not permission. The coordinates are a matter of public record in the datasets linked above, as they are for every inventoried spring in Idaho, but anyone wanting to see this water needs the landowner’s permission first, and this page cannot give it. For an actual soak in the same country, the documented public option is a few miles east at Wild Rose, below.

The Spring Itself

What is documented is a genuinely hot spring by Idaho standards. The inventories put the source between 122 and 126 °F, hot enough that any bathing pool has to blend it down, and the water rises through Quaternary basalt, the young volcanic rock that floors this stretch of the Little Wood River valley. When a University of Idaho and Idaho National Laboratory team sampled Idaho’s geothermal waters in March 2014, they took Condie’s sample from an open-air pool at the spring and measured 51 °C. The USGS has also used Condie’s water in groundwater-dating research, one of a handful of Idaho springs sampled for that work.

Beyond the sampling visits, the record stops. No source describes the pools’ construction, counts them, or says who dug them, and nothing published since 2014 describes the spring’s condition. Whether the pools are maintained, derelict, or gone is simply not in the record, and this listing will not guess.

History

Condie’s one moment in the written spotlight is a good one. George A. McLeod’s History of Alturas and Blaine Counties (1930) surveyed the county’s natural hot springs and wrote: “The natural hot springs in Blaine County are the Condie, near Carey, Hailey, Clarendon, Guyer, Warfield, Easley, and Russian John. These springs are favorite resorts for bathing.” In 1930, then, Condie stood in the same company as Easley and Guyer, springs that went on to documented resort lives.

Condie’s own resort era, if it had one, left no other trace: no resort name, no building, no advertisement, and no later account of the public bathing there has surfaced. The spring’s modern life is scientific instead. It was measured for the federal and state geothermal inventories in the Mitchell and others (1980) era, visited and catalogued in the Idaho Conservation Data Center’s 1995 ecology study of south-central Idaho’s geothermal springs, sampled by the USGS for groundwater dating, and sampled again in 2014 for geothermal chemistry. Few unvisited springs in Idaho are this well measured, and few measured springs are this unvisited.

Nearby Hot Springs

For a soak you can actually take in this country, Wild Rose (Milford Sweat) Hot Springs is a black lava rock pool on BLM land outside Carey, a few miles east of the Condie country, and it is the area’s documented public option. More South-Central Idaho hot springs →