Danskin Creek Hot Spring

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

Danskin Creek Hot Spring appears in the federal thermal springs list on Danskin Creek where it meets the South Fork Payette River in Boise County, east of Garden Valley. The U.S. Geological Survey’s GEOTHERM file carries it as record 0001433 in T8N R5E Sec 1, and the Idaho Department of Water Resources geothermal dataset carries it under the plural name Danskin Creek Hot Springs in the same section.

Three registries, one creek, one section. It is also one of the seven South Fork Payette springs that geothermal researchers sampled and published water chemistry for, which makes it better documented as water than most springs in this corner of the inventory, and no better documented as a place to visit: no pool, development, visit, or public access appears anywhere.

Read this page as a documentation record for a real, inventoried spring in the Garden Valley corridor, not as a destination guide. The registries do not even agree on a single point for it, and this listing states that plainly below rather than smoothing it over. Its value is the record itself.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

Danskin Creek is a short tributary that drops to the South Fork Payette River from the north side of the Garden Valley to Lowman corridor, and the spring locality the registries describe sits on the creek near the river, in T8N R5E Sec 1. It is settled valley and forest edge country, not remote backcountry: the river road, farms and ranches, and well known soaking neighbours are all close. None of that makes the spring itself a documented place to go. No road or trail to the spring is published anywhere, and no agency lists it as a recreation site.

One honesty note belongs here, because the registries themselves raise it. The records plot two points about 650 m apart in the same section: GEOTHERM’s point sits at the creek mouth, while the IDWR dataset’s named record sits a short distance up the creek, and IDWR keeps a second, unnamed record at the creek mouth point and asks in its own comment whether both records are Danskin Creek Hot Springs.

They may be two vents of one spring, or two small springs sharing a creek and a name. This listing covers the locality the records share, and deliberately gives the general area only: a set of coordinates is not an invitation, and on land of unconfirmed ownership it is not permission. The Danskin River Access boat launch near the creek mouth is a separate, named river site; it is not this spring, and no source connects the two.

Is There a Soak Here?

The honest answer is that no source describes one. No soaking guide covers this spring, no trip report or photograph of a visit exists in any source consulted, and the aggregator pages that carry its name repeat the registry row and nothing more. The state dataset records its use as unknown. What does exist is proof of water: the inventory surveys measured it at up to 106 °F, and researchers sampled and analyzed it decades later, so the spring was still flowing warm water at the end of the twentieth century.

A flowing hot spring on a creek in a settled valley can be a ranch amenity, a seep in a pasture, or a wild creekside vent, and the record does not say which. If a landowner confirmation, a county record, or a credible field report ever surfaces, this page will be updated.

History

Danskin Creek Hot Spring enters the written record the way most springs in this corridor do, through the geothermal surveys of the 1970s and early 1980s: the federal list carries it on the Garden Valley quadrangle, GEOTHERM holds it as record 0001433, and the state dataset’s temperature traces to Mitchell and others in 1980, with its flow estimate traced to Young and Mitchell in 1973. The name is the creek’s name first; Danskin Creek is a mapped Boise County stream, and the spring took its name from the water it rises beside.

Unlike most registry only springs, Danskin was visited by scientists after the inventory era. In their study of the South Fork Payette geothermal system, published in Chemical Geology in 2001, Druschel and Rosenberg included Danskin Creek among the system’s seven thermal springs and published its water chemistry: alkaline water, pH 9.4, sampled at about 99 °F at roughly 3,280 ft elevation, its chemistry grouping it with the other fracture fed springs along the river. That study is this listing’s second thread, and it is a thread about water, not about bathing: nothing in it describes a pool or a visit by anyone but the sampling team.

One confusion is worth settling on the page, because the name invites it. This spring has nothing to do with the Danskin Mountains of Elmore County, north of Mountain Home, or with the power plant that carries the Danskin name in that country. Those Danskins are some 50 miles southeast. The registry record, the creek, and this listing all belong to Boise County and the South Fork Payette.

Nearby Hot Springs

The nearest full listing is Campground Hot Springs, a separate registry record about four and a half miles west on the same river corridor, followed by Pine Flats Hot Springs about seven miles east. Both are documented, visitable places with their own pages; Danskin Creek, a few miles between them, is a record only, and none of their facts belong to it. More South-Central Idaho hot springs →