The Lake of the Woods 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.
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79° on Nov. 15, 1995, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1934. Next is 79° in 2016.
Lake of the Woods’s center stands about 5,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,830 ft to 7,690 ft, a difference of 2,860 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Pinos, about 8,820 ft, 9 miles west.
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 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 3×. 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.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Paleocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Oligocene, 23 to 66 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 smaller units 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 Lake of the Woods reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of Cuddy Creek: about 25 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Often dry. About 90% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
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 Lake of the Woods; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lake of the Woods has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 38° in February. About 13 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lake of the Woods normally reaches 60° and falls to 45°. The record high is 79°, in 2021; the record low 24°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 1.95 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1934 at Sandberg, 16 miles east-southeast, 640 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
