The Soda Springs 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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5.29 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1909. The next wettest, 4.96 inches, fell in 2017.
Soda Springs’s center stands about 6,840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,230 ft to 8,020 ft, a difference of 1,790 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Lola, about 9,120 ft, 8 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary glacial deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene, 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 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.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, felsic-volcanic. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 260 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Slate, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Late Jurassic, 145 to 422 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Argillite, quartzite, phyllite. Age: Ordovician to Triassic, 202 to 487 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.
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 Soda Springs reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the South Yuba, the Yuba, the Feather and the Sacramento: about 200 river miles.
75 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Soda Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Soda Springs has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 179 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 33 inches of water.
On November 14 Soda Springs normally reaches 48° and falls to 26°. The record high is 65°, in 1990; the record low 5°, in 1915. The most rain on this date, 2.99 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 from the Tahoe City Area threaded record (Tahoe City, 17 miles southeast, 610 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
