Elk Creek Hot Springs

Documentation record: Elk Creek Hot Springs is a multi-vent spring group on private land, with no documented pool and no public access. This page records what the official geothermal registries say about the spring, and nothing beyond it.

Elk Creek Hot Springs appears in the federal thermal springs list at 126 °F, on Elk Creek in the Soldier Mountain foothills north of Fairfield. The list’s quadrangle column reads “Blaine 15,” a map name rather than a county: the spring is in Camas County, as the U.S. Geological Survey’s GEOTHERM file, the state inventory, and a coordinate county lookup all agree, placing it in T1N R15E Sec 14. The federal place-names record verifies the same feature at the same point. Four records converge, and they converge on a group, not a single vent.

The state inventory describes five spring vents and numerous seeps at this site, and the surveys that followed spent fifty years measuring them one by one. Read this page as a documentation record for a real, still-active spring group, not as a destination guide: no pool, development, visit, or public access is documented anywhere for Elk Creek Hot Springs, the one ownership inventory consulted classifies the land private, and no agency manages it as a recreation site.

Soak Stats

Place Information

Location and Access

The spring group sits on Elk Creek in the southern Soldier Mountains, in the foothill country above the Camas Prairie floor, which lies to the south. It is ranch and foothill country at the prairie’s north edge, geothermal ground the state has inventoried for over sixty years, and it reads on the maps as a cluster rather than a point: the state dataset holds three numbered records here, Elk Creek Hot Springs #1, #2, and #3, which are vents of this one group in the same section, not three separate springs.

Beyond that, this listing deliberately does not go. No published route to the spring exists, no source describes a visit, and the ownership inventory that classifies the land private records no visit even by its own surveyor. The coordinates are public record in the registries linked above, but a set of coordinates is not an invitation, and on private land it is not permission. Anyone with a genuine reason to visit should establish land ownership and get the landowner’s permission first.

Is There a Soak Here?

The honest answer is that no source describes one. No soaking guide covers this spring group, no trip report or photograph of a visit exists in any source consulted, and no agency page presents it as a place to go. The water is there, several vents of it properly hot, but a hot spring group on private ranch land is not a soaking place, and nothing suggests it was ever developed as one. The people who have written about this water wrote as scientists and inventory crews. If a landowner confirmation or a credible field report ever surfaces, this page will be updated.

History

The spring’s written record is an inventory record, and a long one. The state bulletin, Water Information Bulletin No. 30 (Young and Mitchell, 1973), lists Elk Creek Hot Springs in its Camas County table with Walton, 1962 as the principal reference, describing five spring vents and numerous seeps in Cretaceous granitic rocks near their contact with younger volcanic rocks, and estimating the group’s discharge at 15 gallons a minute. GEOTHERM holds the spring as record 0000513, and the state dataset’s modern vent records descend from the 1980 Mitchell survey work, which measured the vents individually.

The record never went quiet. Moseley’s 1990s ecology inventory of south-central Idaho’s geothermal springs tabled the site as private and unvisited, and in 2016 and 2017 the spring group was sampled again as one of the named prospects of the Camas Prairie geothermal system, in Idaho National Laboratory and Stanford studies of the prairie’s hot water: two of its vents measured that round at 50 and 56 °C. Across more than sixty years the spring is always a geothermal occurrence and never a developed site. The registries and the studies are the whole file, and this listing prints them as they stand.

Nearby Hot Springs

The nearest full listing is Worswick Hot Springs, another Camas Prairie cluster spring about 13 miles west, published on this site in full. It is a different spring entirely, in its own drainage, and none of its facts belong to this record; it is simply the closest listing in the same country. More South-Central Idaho hot springs →ns