The Hot Springs Mountains are a range of rocky hills located in Northern Nevada, in Churchill County, between the cities of Fallon, Lovelock, and Fernley. The area was recently volcanically active (in geological terms), is underlain by hot rocks, and is the site of several geothermal electric power plants. It is an arid, rough terrain, uninhabited. These mountains are adjacent to the

Lahontan Valley The Lahontan Valley is a basin in Churchill County, Nevada, United States. The valley is a landform of the central portion of the prehistoric Lake Lahontan's lakebed of 20,000-9,000 years ago. The valley and the adjacent Carson Sink represent a ...

, which contains the Forty Mile Desert, a daunting section of the 19th century California emigrant trail. During the

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological Epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fina ...

epoch this range of mountains was an island in the now extinct

Lake Lahontan Lake Lahontan was a large endorheic Pleistocene lake of modern northwestern Nevada that extended into northeastern California and southern Oregon. The area of the former lake is a large portion of the Great Basin that borders the Sacramento Rive ...

References

Mountain ranges of Nevada Mountain ranges of the Great Basin {{ChurchillCountyNV-geo-stub