The South Lake Tahoe 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.
Mostly cloudy
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4.50 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1968. The next wettest, 1.27 inches, fell in 2020.
South Lake Tahoe’s center stands about 6,270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,220 ft to 8,170 ft, a difference of 1,950 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Freel Peak, about 10,840 ft, 7 miles southeast.
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.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Slate, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Late Jurassic, 145 to 422 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 South Lake Tahoe reaches Pyramid Lake by way of Trout Creek and the Truckee: about 140 river miles. Pyramid Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Lake on the way: Lake Tahoe.
110 miles of the trip are on the Truckee.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of South Lake Tahoe; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
South Lake Tahoe has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in December. About 20 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 South Lake Tahoe normally reaches 52° and falls to 24°. The record high is 69°, in 2016; the record low 2°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.37 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1968 at South Lake Tahoe Airport, 2 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
