The Mammoth Lakes 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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Mammoth Lakes’s center stands about 7,890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 7,340 ft to 9,740 ft, a difference of 2,400 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Red Slate Mountain, about 13,120 ft, 11 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary volcanic flow rocks, unit 2 (Long Valley Caldera) (rhyolite), from the Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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.
Argillite. Age: Cambrian to Permian, 273 to 497 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Rhyolite. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Rhyolite. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basanite. Age: Early Pliocene to Late Pliocene, 3 to 4 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.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Mammoth Lakes reaches Owens Lake by way of Hot Creek and the Owens: about 170 river miles. Owens Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Lake on the way: Lake Crowley.
140 miles of the trip are on the Owens.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mammoth Lakes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
