The Lake Wildwood 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
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Showers likely; cooler
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79° on Nov. 13, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1966. Next is 79° in 2008.
Lake Wildwood’s center stands about 1,480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 910 ft to 1,990 ft, a difference of 1,080 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Banner Mountain, about 3,910 ft, 12 miles east.
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 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 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 Lake Wildwood reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Deer Creek, the Yuba, the Feather and the Sacramento: about 130 river miles.
75 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lake Wildwood; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lake Wildwood has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in December. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 53 inches of water.
On November 14 Lake Wildwood normally reaches 60° and falls to 37°. The record high is 78°, in 1974; the record low 25°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 2.86 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1966 at Grass Valley No. 2, 7 miles east-southeast, 920 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
