The Lake Hughes 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
Sunny
Chance of showers
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
5.11 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1909. The next wettest, 3.62 inches, fell in 1944.
Lake Hughes’s center stands about 3,250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,880 ft to 4,450 ft, a difference of 1,570 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Liebre Mountain, about 5,780 ft, 12 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mesozoic granitic rocks, unit 3 (Sierra Nevada, Death Valley area, Northern Mojave Desert and Transverse Ranges) (granodiorite), from the Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Miocene, 5.3 to 2,500 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.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 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.
Lake Hughes has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in August; winter nights fall to about 37° in December. About 16 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Lake Hughes normally reaches 65° and falls to 44°. The record high is 80°, in 2019; the record low 29°, in 1938. The most rain on this date, 1.50 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Fairmont, 2 miles north-northeast, 190 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
