The Choctaw Valley 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
Partly cloudy
Showers likely; cooler
Sunny
Showers likely
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
89° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 88° in 1900.
Choctaw Valley’s center stands about 570 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 480 ft to 1,320 ft, a difference of 840 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ball Mountain, about 4,660 ft, 13 miles northeast.
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 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
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.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 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.
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 Choctaw Valley reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of the Kern: about 30 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
A lake that comes back. The bed of Tulare Lake is farmland now; in very wet years it floods again.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Choctaw Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Choctaw Valley has a hot desert climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in December. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Choctaw Valley normally reaches 68° and falls to 46°. The record high is 85°, in 1933; the record low 24°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.61 in, fell in 1952.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Bakersfield Area threaded record (Bakersfield Airport, 10 miles west). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
