Bainter Spring
Drag the handle to compare the two views. The orange dot marks the spring, in a frame about three quarters of a mile wide.
Can you soak at Bainter Spring?
The water leaves the ground at 92°F, a comfortable soaking temperature. It's a short walk from the road. It's on Bureau of Land Management land. We haven't confirmed whether it has a pool or charges a fee.
Out on BLM ground near Searles Valley, Bainter Spring is a warm source the Ridgecrest Field Office looks after, in San Bernardino County about five miles from town. The water measures at the low end of soaking warmth, pleasant more than hot. Public access is open. The USGS carries it as a catalogued site, which means a real measured source sits behind the name.
No road name is on file. The access class is a short walk, about seven tenths of a mile past wherever the nearest road ends. This is desert at around twenty-six hundred feet. Rain barely registers, a few inches a year, and snow is a rarity. Public land, with no designation beyond that.
Go in winter; the record lists December through February. There is no campground on file, so plan on a day visit or your own arrangements. Nothing about a fee either. The temperature on record carries no date, so expect the water to feel different from the number.
Aircraft with laser scanners measured this ground to within inches. The scan strips out trees and buildings, leaving the bare shape of the land around Bainter Spring.
- Setting
- Canyon floor
- Steep ground climbs away on both sides of the spring.
- Highest ground nearby
- 439 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the west
A slice through the ground from southwest to northeast, about 0.6 miles end to end.
Elevation data: USGS 3D Elevation Program. Aerial imagery: USGS The National Map. Public domain.
That's about 1½ times the US average of 65. It's higher than at 62% of the springs on this site.
Heat flow measures the warmth working its way up through the ground from deep inside the earth. Where it runs high, rain and snowmelt that seep down through cracks in the rock come back up hot.
See every spring on the geothermal heat map →
Heat flow estimate: Stanford Thermal Earth Model (Aljubran & Horne, 2024), CC BY 4.0.
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