The Sunny Slopes 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
Mostly sunny; cooler
Showers likely
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
Sunny Slopes’s center stands about 7,160 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,640 ft to 8,500 ft, a difference of 1,860 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Morgan, about 13,660 ft, 12 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary pyroclastic and volcanic mudflow deposits, unit 2 (Long Valley Caldera) (rhyolite), from the Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Rhyolite. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Argillite. Age: Cambrian to Permian, 273 to 497 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Hornfels. Age: Neoproterozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Hornfels, marble. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 273 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 smaller units 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 Sunny Slopes reaches Owens Lake by way of Lower Rock Creek and the Owens: about 130 river miles. Owens Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sunny Slopes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
