The Knights Ferry 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
Showers likely
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Mostly sunny
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Partly cloudy
83° on Nov. 11, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1992. Next is 82° in 2016.
Knights Ferry’s center stands about 250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 170 ft to 720 ft, a difference of 550 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bear Mountain, about 2,880 ft, 14 miles north-northeast.
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 12×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Triassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 252 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, 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. 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 Knights Ferry reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the Stanislaus, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 130 river miles.
70 miles of the trip are on the San Joaquin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Knights Ferry; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Knights Ferry has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in January. About 30 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Knights Ferry normally reaches 66° and falls to 45°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 37°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 2.12 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1992 at New Melones Dam Headquarters, 16 miles northeast, 710 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
