The Lucerne Valley 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.
Lucerne Valley’s center stands about 2,940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,850 ft to 3,520 ft, a difference of 670 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Butler Peak, about 8,470 ft, 13 miles south.
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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Marble. Age: Neoproterozoic to Carboniferous, 299 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 0.4 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.