Macfarlanes Bath House Spring

Macfarlanes Bath House Spring is on the road north of Sulphur. In the 1980's, there was a building at that location.

Name

The Spring has various names. GNIS refers to it as "Hot Spring", with an alternate name "Macfarlanes Bath House Spring" from Garside 1979.

The spring is possibly named after Ira MacFarland, a deputy state Engineer in the 1910s and 20s. In 1917, MacFarland obtained water rights to a number of springs including a MacFarland Spring. No location was specified, but he also obtained rights for Brady Springs (near present day I-80?), Stratton Springs (Elko County?), Owen Springs (White Pine County?) and Saw Mill Springs.

There is also a McFarland Spring in Clark County (GNIS), this spring could also be associated with Ira MacFarland.

Other names include McFarland Hot Springs, Jackson Mountains Hot Spring,

Resources

• "Hot Spring" GNIS
  • Alternate Name: Macfarlanes Bath House Spring: Garside, L. J. and Schilling, J. H. 'Thermal Waters of Nevada' Reno: Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology Bulletin 91, 1979, 163 pp. Describes hot springs and hot water seeps of Nevada with location information and map at 1:1,000,000. p102
    • P. 102 has the location of "MacFarlanes's Bath House Spring", a temperature of 170F and 5GPM with a reference from Sinclair 1963a
      • Sinclair, "Ground-water appraisal of the Black Rock Desert area, northwestern Nevada," Nevada Dept. Conserv. and Nat. Resources, Ground-water Resources-Reconn. Ser. Rept. 20. 1963. p. 24 mentions "Macfarlanes' bathhouse"
    • "Macfarlane's Bath House Spring" appears as location 132 in the Garside (1979) Map.

• "Report of the State Engineer," p. 75, 1917 shows an Ira MacFarland getting water rights to a number of springs
  • Reno Evening Gazette, "Community Well: Plan at Orovada," November 11, 1921, p. 31. States that a person named Ira MacFarlane is the Deputy State Engineer.
• "Mineral Resources of the Black Rock Desert Wilderness Study Area, Humboldt County, Nevada," Bureau of Mines Mineral Land Assessment, 1985 Open File Report, MLA 65-85. "According to the BLM, nearly 27,000 acres are held under geothermal lease near Pinto Hot Springs and McFarland Hot Springs. Although most of the WSA is of interest for oil and gas, an exploratory oil well, on the east side of the WSA, completed to a depth of 7931 ft in 1983, is reportedly dry (U.S Bureau of Land Management, 1983)."
  • The well logs are at http://www.nbmg.unr.edu/lists/oil/logs/27-013-05002/. Map. See also Mining.
• Swanberg, C. A., and Roger L. Bowers, "Downward continuation of temperature gradients at MacFarlane's Hot Spring, northern Nevada," Geothermal Res. Council Trans., 6, 177-180, 1982.
• Donald R. Tuohy, "Notes on a Clovis Point from the Black Rock Desert, Nevada," Nevada Archaeologist, v. 7, n. 1, 1989. Description of arrowhead collected in the vicinity of "McFarland's bath house"
• Lisa Shevenell and Larry Garside, "Geochemical Sampling of Thermal Waters in Nevada," Geothermal Resources Council Transactions, Vol. 27, October 12-1 5, 2003. Description of "Macfarlanes Bath House Spring".
• Mills, G. L.; Li, Y.; Jones, M.; Paddock, L.; Romanek, C. S.; Zhang, C. L.; Wiegel, J., "Carbon Isotope Signatures of Microbial Mats in the Jackson Mountain Hot Spring, Nevada," American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2004, abstract #B21D-0909.
• Matt C. Bischoff, "California and Nevada Hot Springs," p. 139, 2005. Photo of "Jackson Mountain (Macfarlane) Hot Springs"
• Sabina M Kraushaar,"Controls of the Macfarlane Geothermal System, Humboldt County," Geological Society of America, 2013.

Images

• Kenneth Carpenter, "McFarland's Bath House, Black Rock Desert," 1981 photograph, UNRS-P1984-09-08, Special Collections Department, University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
• Garside et al, "Update to B91," Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology, 2002.