Mountain Springs (Clark County)

Mountain Springs is a spring in the Spring Mountains in Clark County, Nevada. The spring lies at an elevation 5,528 feet / 1,685 meters, up a draw north of the town of Mountain Springs, Nevada.^[1]

History

John C. Fremont described the spring when his expedition encountered it while exploring what became the Fremont Cutoff on May 1, 1844:

"We encamped at a spring in the pass, which had been the site of an old village. Here we found excellent grass, but very little water. We dug out the old spring, and watered some of our animals. The mountain here was wooded very slightly with the nut pine, cedars, and a dwarf species of oak; and among the shrubs were Purshia tridenlata, artemisia, and ephedra occidentalis."^{[2] :265}

William Chandless, an Englishman, traveling the Mormon Road on horseback from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles on Jan. 18th, 1856, rode up to Mountain Springs from Las Vegas Springs later described the route and the spring:

"The cliffs soon after you leave the valley of Los Vegos are very beautiful from their colour, the purple and crimson as rich as those of the most gorgeous sunset. The Mountain Springs, too, was a pretty spot, among pine, and cedar-wood, and high mountain tops; and though a regular camping place on the route, yet with an air of solitude very impressive. A small bright-blue bird, the first sign of a warmer climate, kept hopping round and, as it seemed, warming himself at our pine-wood fire, all the time singing merrily. Though at a considerable elevation, we found no snow here, nor even saw it on the peaks very much above us; but at Cottonwood Creek, fifteen miles back, and before you begin to ascend, we came upon a little in a sheltered place—the only snow we saw in the four hundred miles from the rim of the Basin to the Sierra Nevada."

Chandless left the springs taking the Kingston Cutoff, a horse mail trail, that ran 40 waterless miles from Mountain Springs to Kingston Springs, and another 40 miles to Bitter Spring linking up again with the Mormon Road along Salt Creek in Silurian Valley.^[3]:295-296

References

1. U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Mountain Springs
2. John Charles Frémont, John Torrey, James Hall, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in the Year 1842: And to Oregon and North California in the Years 1843-44, Gales and Seaton, printers, Washington, 1845
3. Chandless, William, A visit to Salt Lake: being a journey across the plains and a residence in the Mormon settlements at Utah, Smith, Elder and Co, London, 1857.