About this site

Last updated 2026-10-02.

Hot Springs of Canada is an independent reference to Canadian thermal springs, written and maintained from British Columbia. It exists because the information that actually decides a trip — whether a spring is open this week, whether there is a road to it, whether the land manager has closed it — is scattered across park advisories, operator pages and decades-old geoscience reports, and nobody had put it in one place.

What is here

39 researched visitor guides — the springs people can realistically plan a trip around, each written from published sources and carrying hours, access notes, a plain assessment and approximate coordinates.
A 180-record national inventory — every thermal, warm and mineral spring we could find in the published record, including undeveloped and historically reported sites. These are research records, not a list of places it is safe or legal to bathe.
A status board — the current open, closed, seasonal and notice state of all 39 guides, with the date each was last verified.

How the research is done

Each guide is written from named, linkable published sources, and those sources are listed at the bottom of the guide so you can check our reading against the original. Across the 39 guides there are 141 cited sources. In order of preference we use:

The land manager — BC Parks and Parks Canada park pages, advisories, management direction statements and park-purpose documents.
The operator — for commercially run pools, the operator’s own published hours and notices.
The geoscience record — provincial and Geoscience BC spring inventories and water-chemistry reports for temperatures, flow and location data.
Encyclopaedic and community sources — used for background and route description, never as the sole authority for whether a place is open.

Three things we are deliberately careful about

Coordinates are historical source coordinates, not trailheads. They come from published spring inventories, their datum and accuracy have not been independently verified, and they should never be used as a navigation target. Every guide says so on its own page.
Temperatures are measured sample values from the published record, with the number of samples shown. They are what somebody recorded at a source at a point in time, not a promise about what the water will feel like in a pool today.
Closures override everything else. Where a land manager has posted a closure we lead with it, even on a spring with an otherwise appealing write-up, and we do not treat older trip reports as permission to enter.

How the status board is monitored

A monitor on our own server re-reads the official page behind each guide every Monday and Thursday, compares it with the previous copy, and flags any page whose wording around closures, advisories, maintenance or seasons has changed. The status board shows the date of the last successful check for each row. A flagged change is reviewed by a person before the status wording on the site is altered.

We are precise about what this proves. An automated check establishes that the official page has not changed since we last read it. It cannot establish that a spring is open, safe, or reachable today. The official link in each guide is always the authority, and it is there for you to follow.

Photographs

Photographs are used under Creative Commons or equivalent licences, with the photographer, the licence and a link to the original credited on each guide and collected on the home page. Images are resized and may be displayed cropped; the original licence still applies. Where we have no properly licensed photograph of a spring we say so rather than substituting a generic stock image of somewhere else.

Safety, and the limits of this site

Thermal water can scald. Backcountry springs involve river crossings, logging roads, bears and long distances from help, and several on our list have no maintained trail at all. Some are inside ecological reserves or on private property where bathing is not permitted. Nothing here is a substitute for the land manager’s current advice, a current trail report, or your own judgement on the day. Read the official link, tell somebody where you are going, and turn around when the conditions say so.

How this site is paid for

Advertising, through Google AdSense. We take no payment from hot-spring operators, run no affiliate links, and accept nothing in exchange for a favourable review — which is why several guides here say plainly that a site is not worth the drive, or that there is nothing to soak in when you arrive. What we collect from visitors is set out in the privacy policy.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or if you manage one of these springs and our information does not match yours, please write to info@hotspringscanada.ca. Corrections about closures and access are treated as urgent, and a source we can link to is the fastest way to get a change made.

Current open/closed status · All spring guides · Privacy policy