Fly Geyser in 3D: Nevada's Accidental Fountain on Your iPhone

A badly sealed well in the Nevada desert has been building a mineral geyser for decades. Here is how to explore Fly Geyser and the Black Rock country around it in 3D, right from your iPhone.

In the Hualapai Flat, on the western edge of Nevada's Black Rock Desert, three low cones of mineral rock stand in a spread of shallow pools and spit hot water into the air. They are rust red and moss green, layered like dripped candle wax, and they sit in a valley so wide and so empty that they look like something dropped there by mistake.

They were, in a sense. Fly Geyser is not a natural wonder that people found; it is the result of a well that was drilled and never properly sealed. That origin story is part of why it is so hard to visit. The geyser stands on private ranch land, well back from the highway and behind a fence, and the only legitimate way to stand beside it is a booked, guided walk that runs in the warmer months. Turning up and hoping is not an option.

Which makes it a place worth scouting before you drive two hours into the desert. You can start today, in full 3D with live Street View, right from your phone.

What makes Fly Geyser special

The sequence began with irrigation. Early in the twentieth century a well was sunk here in the hope of watering the valley, and it produced hot water instead of cold, building a first cone over the following decades. Then, in the 1960s, a second well was drilled during geothermal prospecting. The water proved too cool to be worth harnessing, the hole was left inadequately capped, and pressurised mineral-rich water has been escaping ever since.

What comes out is loaded with dissolved calcium carbonate. As it sprays and cools, that mineral drops out of solution and hardens where it lands, so the cones have been growing steadily for decades — a geyser built by its own discharge, at a rate you could almost watch.

The colours are alive. Thermophilic algae, the heat-loving kind that thrives on the warm wet surfaces, coat the mounds in reds, oranges and greens that shift with the season. The overflow runs downhill into terraced pans and a broad wetland of reeds and standing water. The land around it, known as Fly Ranch, was bought in 2016 by the organisation behind Burning Man, which now runs the access programme.

How to explore Fly Geyser in 3D

The geyser is small and the valley is enormous, and that contrast is the thing photographs never manage. MAPAS renders the whole basin in real 3D, so you can pull back to the scale of the mountain range and then drop to the scale of the pools.

For a first run, try this order:

1. Search for Gerlach, Nevada, and switch to 3D so the valley floor and the surrounding ranges lift into relief.
2. Follow State Route 34 north out of town onto Hualapai Flat and find the bright wetland and pond system, which shows clearly from above.
3. Bring the camera low over the cones and the terraces to see how the runoff spreads downslope into pans.
4. Drop into live Street View on Route 34 and look east, so you can judge exactly how far off the road the geyser really sits.
5. Fly southeast over the Black Rock playa, the immense dry lakebed that defines this whole corner of Nevada.
6. Plan the drive up from Reno with GPS navigation, noting where the last fuel is.

Beyond the geyser

• Black Rock Desert playa — a dry lakebed so flat and featureless it has been used for land-speed records.
• Gerlach — the last town on the road, a handful of buildings, a bar and a famously good welcome.
• Guru Road — a dirt track outside Gerlach lined with hand-carved stone signs and sculptures.
• Soldier Meadows and High Rock Canyon — remote hot springs and a canyon on the old Applegate emigrant trail.
• Pyramid Lake — a deep desert lake with strange tufa spires, passed on the drive north from Reno.

What the aerial view shows that a close-up cannot

Every famous photograph of Fly Geyser is taken from a few metres away, which turns it into an abstract object. Tilt the 3D view and the setting arrives all at once. The cones sit near the western edge of a broad, flat valley, with the Granite Range rising sharply to the west and the playa spreading away to the southeast.

From above, the geyser is clearly the head of a small system: cones, terraces, a chain of ponds, then marsh fading into dry ground. And you see the geology behind it: this is Basin and Range country, where the crust has been pulled apart into blocks and faults, and those faults let hot water rise. The valley is dotted with springs for the same reason the drillers found hot water in the first place.

Before you go

Spring and autumn are the sensible seasons. Summer on the playa is punishing, with heat, glare and no shade for many miles; winter turns the dirt roads to mud and the guided walks generally do not run. Reno is the nearest airport, a couple of hours away by car through Pyramid Lake country.

Gerlach is the last reliable fuel, food and phone signal, so fill the tank and carry water. The discharge is scalding, so stay on whatever route your guide sets. This is a fragile mineral structure; nothing about it should be climbed or chipped.

Common questions

Can I see Fly Geyser from the road?

Only just. From State Route 34 you can make out steam and a smudge of colour across the flat, but the fence is there for a reason and the detail that makes the place worth seeing is not visible at that distance.

Is it a real geyser?

The plumbing is man-made and the process is not. A drilled well provides the water and the pressure; the cones, the mineral terraces and the algae have built themselves since, exactly as they would at a natural hot spring.

Is MAPAS free to use?

Yes. It is free on the App Store, needs no sign-up before you start exploring, and works on iPhone and iPad.

There is something clarifying about a landscape this empty, and something odd about the fact that its strangest feature is an accident nobody meant to make.

Open MAPAS, tilt the camera over Hualapai Flat, and find the small bright thing in all that desert.