Unnamed Thermal 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 this spring?
The water leaves the ground at 70°F, about as warm as a heated pool. You can drive right up to it. We haven't confirmed whether it has a pool or charges a fee.
Inside Mount Diablo State Park in Contra Costa County, roughly four miles from Clayton, there is an unnamed thermal point with water of about seventy degrees. Tepid. Nothing anyone would sit in, more a warm seep. The state park ground is listed as open, and the point sits a few dozen feet from a road, so reaching it takes little effort. A temperature is on record and little else.
Low hills inside the state park at about 650 feet, no snow, dry apart from winter rain. Fifty-odd feet from the road edge. The California state park system manages the ground. No campground is recorded near this point in our data, and no fee is noted.
The listed window is midwinter, though the roads here stay clear year round. Roadside. State park rules apply. No fee recorded. No camping in the record for this point. The water is not warm enough for a meaningful soak, so come for the curiosity of it.
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 this spring.
- Setting
- Hillside
- The spring sits on a steep slope that climbs to the northwest.
- Highest ground nearby
- 276 ft above the spring
- Within a quarter mile, to the northwest
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 30% 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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