The Big Pine 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny; cooler
Showers likely
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
82° on Nov. 17, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1943. Next is 80° in 2021.
Big Pine’s center stands about 4,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,900 ft to 5,230 ft, a difference of 1,330 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Polemonium Peak, about 14,080 ft, 13 miles west-southwest.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 2×. 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.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, dolostone. Age: Neoproterozoic to Middle Devonian, 384 to 1,000 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Big Pine reaches Owens Lake by way of the Big Pine Canal and the Owens: about 80 river miles. Owens Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
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 Pine; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Big Pine has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 100° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in December. About 5 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Big Pine normally reaches 65° and falls to 27°. The record high is 79°, in 1967; the record low 16°, in 1994. The most rain on this date, 0.94 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1943 from the Bishop Area threaded record (Bishop Airport, 15 miles north-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
