Austin Hot Spring A great Topo map find. Another site spotted while pouring over topo maps during the winter months. This remote spring just East of Austin is probably featured in one of those dipshit “hot spring guides” under another name (Sorry, I just can’t respect anyone who whores out their favorite places with GPS coodinates and road directions just to make a buck! We prefer to find our own sites!) After tracking through some of the emptiest parts of Nevada where you might see one car every hour or two, we spotted our quarry:

A bona-fide hot  spring being fed into a stock tank. The water in the tank was a bit on the cool  side, (maybe 95 degrees) but the source was plenty hot; I’m sure a little  tweaking of the plumbing would have spruced things up, but since we were mainly looking for a quick bath, we didn’t meddle with the piping. Jan used a cup to take a “shower” while standing beside the tank so as not to foul the tank with soap while I wallowed in the hot water. Exploring the lake bed revealed a half dozen very hot sources within 100 yards, most about the size of a groundhog hole but full of 140 degree water lined with blue mineral deposits.    We proceeded around the playa for another 18 miles of dirt road rather than backtrack, relying on dead-reckoning navigation and a BLM topo map that showed a dotted line that might have been a road. The reality turned out to be a nicely graded gravel road that reconnected with the highway just where we hoped it would.  Good thing too, because I would have never heard the end of it if we’d ended up stuck in a playa somewhere!!!  .

one of the several source springs nearby. Most were about a foot across with crystal clear water  ranging from 105 to 140 degrees

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