Bitney Springs

About three-tenths of a mile up Bitney Springs Road from the Rough and Ready Highway, a small canopy stands on the right-hand side. Under it is a cement base with pipes coming out, and from three spouts the water runs continuously. There is no fee and no closing hour. People pull over with jugs and bottles. Writing on the site Find A Spring in 2015, a man named Justin said his family had been driving up from Sacramento for over 30 years, filling five-gallon jugs “a truckload at a time at sunrise.”

Find A Spring gives the nearest address as approximately 10289 Bitney Springs Road, Nevada City. In 2002 a local-history quiz in The Union, the Grass Valley newspaper, placed the road off Rough and Ready Highway in rural Grass Valley. The same quiz said the road was once called Beckman Hill Road and was renamed to honor the spring.

What visitors have tested

Find A Spring lists the water’s total dissolved solids at 37. Visitors have posted results of their own. One commenter, Dozer, wrote that he collects and analyzes storm, waste and surface water for his work. He had samples taken on 4/6/2017 tested for aluminum, arsenic, iron, mercury and zinc and reported that none were detected. In November 2021 a commenter named Laura wrote that a kit test for lead, bacteria, pesticides, chlorine, nitrates and other substances came back “within ideal range.” In July 2025 another, Alex, reported a pH of about 6.5 from a home electronic tester.

The county keeps no such record. In 2009 The Union reported that the owners, Anna and George Partington of Bakersfield, had given the county permission three years earlier to post a sign warning that the water is not monitored. Wesley Nicks, Nevada County’s Environmental Health Director, told the paper that a county analysis several years before had found nothing wrong. That result, he said, did not guarantee that a rodent would never fall into the cistern. “It’s up to the people to make a decision whether they drink it,” Nicks said. He advised boiling the water for one minute, or adding a teaspoon of bleach per gallon and letting it stand 30 minutes. “No one likes that option,” he said.

The people who fill up told the paper the water tastes far superior to bottled or city tap water. A brewer from the Bay Area was said to make the trip, and bicyclists and riders on horseback stopped to cool off. “In the summertime when it’s 95 degrees outside, the water is, like, 35 degrees. It’s sparkling, it’s cold, it’s delicious,” said a local woman who gave her name only as Joanna. She said she had been collecting the water since 1994.

A dry March and a horse trough

The paper ran that story because the spring had stopped. On March 5, 2009, the water quit without explanation. Some locals had filled buckets and hundred-gallon tanks there for decades. By the time the article ran on March 13, the water was flowing again. “We still have no idea why it wasn’t flowing,” Nicks said.

Archie Rackerby, then 88, lived 150 yards from the spring. “That spring has been there forever, I guess,” he said. Fifty years earlier, he recalled, his family’s only other water came from a ditch, full of leaves and sticks. “When you took a bath, you always had a lot of company,” he said. His family drank and washed with spring water instead. “A lot of us figured (over a lifetime) we eat a little dirt sometimes. It never hurt anyone,” Rackerby said. He knew of people from Marysville and Oroville who came with buckets in the backs of their pickups, and he had never heard of anyone falling ill.

By Rackerby’s account, a local Lions Club piped the spring and built the little shelter about 40 years before he told the story. Before that, he said, “there was just a big horse watering trough there. As horses came up the road, they would stop to drink.”