The Twin 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.
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Showers likely; cooler
Sunny
Showers likely
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
72° on Nov. 11, 2014, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1988. Next is 71° in 2016.
Twin Lakes’s center stands about 7,110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 7,050 ft to 11,120 ft, a difference of 4,070 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Conness, about 12,380 ft, 13 miles south.
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.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Hornfels, siltstone. Age: Ordovician to Triassic, 202 to 487 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Hornfels. Age: Neoproterozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 1,000 million years old. About 0.3 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 Twin Lakes reaches Walker Lake by way of Robinson Creek, the East Walker and the Walker: about 160 river miles. Walker Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Lake on the way: Bridgeport Reservoir.
80 miles of the trip are on the East Walker.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Twin Lakes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Twin Lakes has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 70 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 15 inches of water.
On November 14 Twin Lakes normally reaches 54° and falls to 28°. The record high is 66°, in 1990; the record low 17°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1988 at Lee Vining, 19 miles southeast, 310 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
