Desert springs are remote pools of water, an unexpected and unlikely sight in a landscape defined by dryness. For millennia, they sustained life across the western United States, guiding migration and shaping where people settled.
They are living archives, holding both human and natural history in the same small patch of ground, rare lifelines that sustain biodiversity, cultural history and hydrological systems far out of proportion to their size. Their depletion is often gradual, easy to miss without some memory of what these places once were.
Dyke Hot Springs, Black Rock Desert, Nevada.
Archaeological evidence of Indigenous peoples’ use of hot springs goes back 10,000 years. These modern tubs are for cooling the extremely hot water enough for a pleasant soak.
Alamo Spring, Sonoran Desert, Mexico.
A rare freshwater spring emerges from the desert, creating small islands at the edge of the saltwater ocean.
Tappen Springs, Colorado Plateau, Arizona.
A permanent water source in the arid desert environment, this area has historically served as a critical oasis for Indigenous tribes, local people and historic cattle drives (bottom).
At a Hopi festival in Flagstaff, I spoke with members of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, who described losing the springs their community depends on, and how that loss affects them both physically and culturally. Their words stayed with me. A few weeks later, a spring ecologist invited me on a survey trip into the arid mountains of northeast Arizona. Standing at a single roadside spring, he ran through the list of species it supported, then added, almost in passing, that since 1880 more than 80% of the region’s springs have been ecologically impaired. He estimates that springs support more than 15% of the nation’s endangered species. I was awestruck that so much could depend on so small a place.
Corn Creek Springs, Mojave Desert, Nevada.
Historically and culturally important to Native Americans and later Europeans, the area now lies within the Nevada Test and Training Range.
This project grew through a chain of introductions. A friend of a museum curator in northern Nevada knew someone with a spring on his property, though it took a lot of texting before I found it. A year later, when I was back in the Black Rock Desert, that same landowner, whom I have yet to meet in person, texted me directions to a different spring each day. In return, I sent him images. Finding springs depends as much on strangers, ranchers and landowners as it does on database research.
Liston Seep, Colorado Plateau, Utah.
Once used to water cattle, this spring was diverted and later abandoned after the animals were moved elsewhere.
Mirror Lakes, Bottomless Lakes State Park, Chihuahuan Desert, New Mexico.
These deep, spring-fed sinkholes shrink slowly. Agricultural overpumping is depleting the region’s hidden water table, drying up this ancient desert oasis.
People often ask if my photographs show the true color of what is there. Not quite: I desaturate the surrounding land slightly while leaving the spring itself a touch brighter, so the eye catches the pull between the parched ground and the water that transforms it. Translating the science of springs into something that can be felt, not just read, matters to me as much as their visual character, in the spirit of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt’s belief that art builds the emotional connection to nature that data alone can’t.
Hanging Garden, Colorado Plateau, Arizona.
Groundwater moving laterally through porous rock emerges from the cliffside as a desert seep, sustaining a vibrant colony of mosses, ferns and flowering plants.
At a desert spring, silence can seem ordinary in a place where frogs once called. That’s the trouble with a shrinking landscape: Each generation is born into scarcity relative to the last and accepts it as normal, unaware of the loss of past abundance.
Willow Creek, Mojave Desert, California.
Ancient groundwater takes millennia to travel and refill deep basins. Modern agricultural pumping extracts this water faster than nature can replace it, drying up the springs.
Devil’s Inkwell, Bottomless Lakes State Park, Chihuahuan Desert, New Mexico.
An ancient deep-water cenote, or sinkhole, fed by underground springs, attracts scuba divers to the desert.
East Pinto Hot Springs, Black Rock Desert, Nevada.
Indigenous Shoshone and Paiute ancestors used springs in the area for over 6,000 years. Contemporary scientists search these hyper-saline, extremely hot waters for new medicinal compounds.
“Hidden Waters” acts as a witness to what remains, a memory to hold on to. Some springs will not return to what they were. But the act of making their decline visible refuses to let them slip quietly into absence.
Borehole Spring, Mojave Desert, California.
A borehole exploration punctured a pressurized aquifer, creating an accidental oasis that attracts migratory birds and supports wildlife. Severe drought now threatens this wetland.
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This article appeared in the November 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Hidden Waters.”
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