The Gazelle 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.
74° on Nov. 14, 1995, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 74° in 1996.
Gazelle’s center stands about 2,770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,660 ft to 3,940 ft, a difference of 1,280 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Eddy, about 9,000 ft, 14 miles south.
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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Early Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 455 to 480 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Peridotite. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 Gazelle reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Willow Creek, the Shasta and the Klamath: about 210 river miles.
180 miles of the trip are on the Klamath.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gazelle; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gazelle has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. A normal year brings about 12 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 19 inches of water.
On November 14 Gazelle normally reaches 54° and falls to 31°. The record high is 74°, in 1995; the record low 9°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.22 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Yreka, 14 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.