Kanuti Hot Spring. Photo by Ned Rozell.

Kanuti Hot Spring. Photo by Ned Rozell.

Alaska hot springs, far and wide

KANUTI HOT SPRINGS — After a few hours of skiing through deep snow, Forest Wagner and I smelled a tuna sandwich. We knew we were closing in on warm pools of water.

From the frozen Kanuti River, we moved along an open stream up toward Kanuti Hot Springs, one of more than 100 hot springs in Alaska. Except for the extreme northwest portion of the state, hot springs exist from Attu in the Aleutians to the northwest Brooks Range to as far south as you can get in Southeast.

The majority are on or near volcanoes, with very hot water bubbling or steaming up from deep below, where Earth’s great crustal plates are grinding past one another.

In non-volcanic areas of Alaska like the Interior, deep warm rocks that were once magma are the heat source. Water that falls as snow and rain percolates down until it reaches those hot rocks. Superheated, that water rises, snaking upward through fractures in the ground and pooling on the surface as steaming water.

On a white, windy spring day that felt like midwinter, Forest and I skied into a clearing and found Kanuti Hot Springs, about 13 miles from where the Dalton Highway crosses the Kanuti River.

Kanuti is in a field of brown grass surrounded by a forest covered with two feet of snow. The thawed acre featured several pools of hot water. We pulled our mittens off and stuck our bare hands in the largest one. We were in luck: the temperature was about 110 degrees Fahrenheit, not too hot, not too cold.

Using our ski-pole baskets as strainers, Forest and I scooped out floating algae and greenish blobs of cyanobacteria. These heat-loving microorganisms give hot springs their splashes of color, from white in water close to the boiling point to yellows and oranges in cooler pools.

Living things floating in water are not the only exotic organisms here, 15 miles south of the Arctic Circle. In the field around us grew a grassy fern known as fowl mannagrass. It does not exist in valleys on either side of Kanuti Hot Springs. It only grows here and at one other hot spring in Alaska. Somehow, some way, seeds of the plant found their way to this heated meadow behind Caribou Mountain.

American dippers, roundish birds that feed underwater year-round, live near many hot springs and the unfrozen creeks the warm water enables. We saw none at Kanuti, but a pair has nested behind a waterfall emerging from Melozi Hot Springs near Ruby.

The trees surrounding the Kanuti clearing are typical of the boreal forest, but Pilgrim Springs on the Seward Peninsula is home to spruce and pine trees, probably planted by someone during that place’s long occupation. Balsam poplar trees also grow there. Pilgrim Springs was home to a pair of nesting great horned owls when I visited in teh spring of 2015. Surrounded by an ocean of tundra, the forest-dwelling birds might be living their entire lives on that island of trees.

In places like Pilgrim, Manley and Circle hot springs, people have used the warm water to heat lodges and greenhouses and have planted large fields of vegetables in the microclimate of warm soil. The operators of Chena Hot Springs, connected by road to Fairbanks, are generating their own electricity using the temperature difference between hot and cold water.

For many years, scientists and engineers have studied the potential of Alaska hot springs to provide heat and power for communities dependent on diesel fuel. Very few of the projects have progressed beyond the initial stages. Why? That reason was obvious as Forest and I soaked in Kanuti Hot Springs, hearing only the wind whistle through birch branches.

While I have visited a dozen hot springs in Alaska, I have driven to just three. Most of them are like Kanuti — in windy places near lonely bends of a river, far from anywhere Alaskans call home.


• Ned Rozell is a science writer for the Geophysical Institute. Since the late 1970s, the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Geophysical Institute has provided this column free in cooperation with the UAF research community.


More in Neighbors

Photo by Charles Whittlesey
Tatiana McWethy demonstrates her restoration technique on the icon of St. Nicholas.
Living and Growing: Historic Russian-American icons receive 1st restoration in 130 years

When that rare Juneau sunlight hit the canvas, St. Nicholas came to life, and swam in it

Photos by Bill Glude
About 50 people attended a rally promoting Canada-United States friendship on the international border near Skagway on July 5.
About 50 people from the Yukon and Skagway attend border rally

Aim of rally in the White Pass was the promotion of Canada-United States friendship and good relations

The old Forest Service administration bunkhouse building pictured here was built during the boom of the logging industry and has sat empty for decades. Now, it may be repurposed as a cultural healing center in Kake, Alaska. Photo by Tyler Bell.
Salmon State: A healing center for Kake

The center will be open to attendees from all Southeast Alaska communities, especially rural ones.

Toasted nuts top this shortbread cookie bar.
Cooking for Pleasure: Three layers of sweetness

These bar cookies combine layers or shortbread, chocolate and toasted nuts

Jensen-Olson Arboretum is seen in this undated photo. (Michael S. Lockett / Juneau Empire File)
Free art lessons for children to be hosted at arboretum July 26

Registration opens July 16 at noon and is limited to 20 students.

Photo courtesy Scott Burton
The first Resilience Circles cohort gathers in Juneau for a cohort retreat.
Woven Peoples and Place: Bridging knowledge systems

Across Southeast Alaska, partners are advancing the co-production of knowledge

Dave Ringle, special projects coordinator at St. Vincent de Paul, is photographed Thursday, June 19, 2025. (Natalie Buttner / Juneau Empire)
Living and Growing: Speaking our values with action

Service changes when there is a relationship involved

Shrimp pasta salad à la New Orleans limits the vegetables to celery and green onions and is mixed with a mayonnaise-based sauce. (Photo by Patty Schied)
Cooking for Pleasure: Making local shrimp the star

Shrimp pasta à la New Orleans focuses on the seafood

Gina Del Rosario. (Peter Segall / Juneau Empire file photo)
Living and Growing: Love

Do you remember the movie “The Ten Commandments?” I was in high… Continue reading

Most Read