The Virginia 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.
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Virginia Lakes’s center stands about 9,630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 7,800 ft to 11,740 ft, a difference of 3,940 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Dana, about 12,960 ft, 11 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 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.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Hornfels, siltstone. Age: Ordovician to Triassic, 202 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Hornfels. Age: Neoproterozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 1,000 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.
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 Virginia Lakes reaches Walker Lake by way of Virginia 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 Virginia Lakes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
