The Silver 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
Silver Lakes’s center stands about 2,460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,390 ft to 2,820 ft, a difference of 430 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Stoddard Mountain, about 4,820 ft, 13 miles east-southeast.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 15×. 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, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 0.8 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 Silver Lakes reaches the desert basins of Owens Valley and Death Valley by way of Fremont Wash and the Mojave: about 85 river miles. The desert basins of Owens Valley and Death Valley has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Often dry. About 40% 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 Silver Lakes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
