Black Rock Hot Spring

Black Rock Hot Spring is a natural geothermal spring in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada, where mineral-rich thermal waters emerge in one of the most visually extraordinary landscapes in North America — the ancient Black Rock playa, a vast flat expanse of white alkaline sediment stretching uninterrupted to the volcanic mountain ranges that mark the horizon in every direction, the desiccated remnant of Lake Lahontan, one of the great ice-age lakes that covered the Great Basin during the Pleistocene. The spring's remote location in Bureau of Land Management wilderness land makes it a destination for self-reliant backcountry visitors who seek the elemental and deeply human pleasure of outdoor thermal bathing in a natural setting entirely free from conventional spa infrastructure — just warm mineral water, open sky, and the astonishing geological theater of the playa around them. The Black Rock Desert's extraordinary cultural landscape — internationally renowned as the temporary site of Burning Man and historically significant as a crossing on the Applegate-Lassen emigrant trail — gives this natural hot spring an unusual double identity as both a wilderness thermal experience and a culturally charged landscape of considerable contemporary significance.