The Shasta Lake 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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81° on Nov. 12, 2019, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1943. Next is 80° in 1955.
Shasta Lake’s center stands about 810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 640 ft to 1,800 ft, a difference of 1,160 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Schell Mountain, about 5,200 ft, 15 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Paleozoic metavolcanic rocks, unit 1 (Eastern Klamath Mountains) (mafic-volcanic), from the Permian, 252 to 299 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 5×. 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: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Mudstone, volcanic. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 273 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.3 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 Shasta Lake reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Churn Creek and the Sacramento: about 300 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Shasta Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Shasta Lake has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 97° in July; winter nights fall to about 40° in January. About 63 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Shasta Lake normally reaches 63° and falls to 46°. The record high is 80°, in 1995; the record low 31°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 6.50 in, fell in 1965.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1943 at Shasta Dam, 3 miles northwest, 260 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
