The Lee Vining 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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72° on Nov. 11, 2014, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1988. Next is 71° in 2016.
Lee Vining’s center stands about 6,870 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,380 ft to 10,090 ft, a difference of 3,710 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Dana, about 12,960 ft, 7 miles southwest.
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 6 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.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Chert, argillite. Age: Ordovician to Devonian, 359 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Triassic to Jurassic, 145 to 252 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Argillite. Age: Cambrian to Permian, 273 to 497 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.
Rain that falls on Lee Vining runs straight into Mono Lake. Mono Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lee Vining; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lee Vining has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 70 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 15 inches of water.
On November 14 Lee Vining normally reaches 54° and falls to 28°. The record high is 66°, in 1990; the record low 17°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1988 at Lee Vining, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
