The El Rancho 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; cooler
Sunny
Showers likely
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
88° on Nov. 12, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 84° in 1953.
El Rancho’s center stands about 390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 350 ft to 1,160 ft, a difference of 810 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hatchet Peak, about 3,290 ft, 14 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Older Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 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 El Rancho reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of Lewis Creek: about 8 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 El Rancho; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
El Rancho has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in December. About 12 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 El Rancho normally reaches 66° and falls to 42°. The record high is 81°, in 2025; the record low 24°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.98 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1913 at Lindsay, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
