About Soaking Springs

Our Mission

Soaking Springs is a comprehensive, free resource for anyone curious about the thermal springs of the United States. We aggregate data from trusted public sources to provide temperature readings, water chemistry, access details, and nearby camping for every documented spring.

Whether you're planning a soak in the backcountry or researching geothermal features from your couch, our goal is to make this information easy to find and easy to understand.

Data Sources

Every spring on this site is built from publicly available datasets. We cross-reference and merge data from:

• USGS — The U.S. Geological Survey provides the foundational dataset of thermal spring locations and temperature measurements.
• OpenStreetMap — Community-contributed geographic data supplements spring locations and access information.
• Wikipedia & Wikidata — Descriptive text, images, and structured metadata for notable springs.
• Recreation.gov — Campground details, fees, and reservation information for nearby public lands.
• SimpleMaps — U.S. city coordinates and population data used for "nearby springs" pages (CC BY 4.0).

Open Data Philosophy

We believe public data should be publicly accessible. Soaking Springs doesn't gate content behind paywalls or require an account. All the underlying data comes from open or public-domain sources, and we aim to give proper attribution throughout the site.

What We Cover

The site catalogs natural thermal springs across every U.S. state where they've been documented — from well-known destinations to remote backcountry seeps. For each spring, we provide whatever data is available: temperature, water chemistry (pH, dissolved solids, specific minerals), access type, land ownership, elevation, and links to external references.