The Big Bear 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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74° on Nov. 14, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1960. Next is 70° in 2008.
Big Bear Lake’s center stands about 6,760 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,200 ft to 8,010 ft, a difference of 1,810 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is San Gorgonio Mountain, about 11,470 ft, 11 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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 6 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Neoproterozoic to Carboniferous, 299 to 1,000 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1.0 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Big Bear Lake reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Big Bear Lake, Bear Creek and the Santa Ana: about 95 river miles.
Lake on the way: Big Bear Lake.
Often dry. About 40% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Bear Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Big Bear Lake has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in December. A normal year brings about 59 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Big Bear Lake normally reaches 54° and falls to 28°. The record high is 74°, in 2021; the record low 8°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 1.00 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1960 at Big Bear Lake, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
