The Angels plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
Mostly sunny
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Showers likely; cooler
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21° on Nov. 12, 1985, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1903. Next is 24° in 1938.
Angels’s center stands about 1,550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,060 ft to 1,970 ft, a difference of 910 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Telegraph Hill, about 3,740 ft, 11 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Undivided pre-Cenozoic metavolcanic rocks, unit 2 (undivided) (mafic-volcanic, greenstone), from the Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Argillite, quartzite, phyllite. Age: Ordovician to Triassic, 202 to 487 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Triassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 252 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, greenstone. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metavolcanic. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 3 smaller units along the line are not listed.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Angels reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Greenhorn Creek, Angels Creek, the Stanislaus, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 150 river miles.
70 miles of the trip are on the Stanislaus.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Angels; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Angels has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in December. About 33 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Angels normally reaches 64° and falls to 37°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 25°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 2.82 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1903 at Sonora, 11 miles southeast, 120 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
