The Truckee 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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75° on Nov. 11, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 73° in 1995.
Truckee’s center stands about 5,810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,730 ft to 6,650 ft, a difference of 920 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Rose, about 10,740 ft, 14 miles east.
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 6×. 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 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Andesite, dacite. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 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 Truckee reaches Pyramid Lake by way of Prosser Creek and the Truckee: about 100 river miles. Pyramid 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 Truckee; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Truckee has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 98 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 22 inches of water.
On November 14 Truckee normally reaches 54° and falls to 20°. The record high is 71°, in 1995; the record low 4°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 1.93 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Boca, 6 miles northeast, 240 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
