The Bass Lake 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.
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84° on Nov. 17, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1904. Next is 83° in 1949.
Bass Lake’s center stands about 3,540 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,820 ft to 5,690 ft, a difference of 2,870 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Iron Mountain, about 9,130 ft, 11 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mesozoic granitic rocks, unit 3 (Sierra Nevada, Death Valley area, Northern Mojave Desert and Transverse Ranges) (granodiorite), from the Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, greenstone. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
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 Bass Lake reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of North Fork Willow Creek, Willow Creek, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 310 river miles.
Lake on the way: Millerton Lake.
260 miles of the trip are on the San Joaquin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bass Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bass Lake has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 33 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bass Lake normally reaches 65° and falls to 37°. The record high is 82°, in 1990; the record low 23°, in 1993. The most rain on this date, 3.20 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1904 at North Fork Rs, 7 miles south-southeast, 900 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
