The Wilsonia 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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72° on Nov. 15, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 71° in 1940.
Wilsonia’s center stands about 6,660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,720 ft to 7,520 ft, a difference of 2,800 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Twin Peaks, about 10,360 ft, 14 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mesozoic granitic rocks, unit 3 (Sierra Nevada, Death Valley area, Northern Mojave Desert and Transverse Ranges) (granodiorite), from the Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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 24 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 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 Wilsonia reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of Mill Flat Creek, the Kings and the North Fork Kings: about 140 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Lake on the way: Pine Flat Lake.
75 miles of the trip are on the Kings.
A lake that comes back. The bed of Tulare Lake is farmland now; in very wet years it floods again.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wilsonia; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wilsonia has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in February. A normal year brings about 186 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Wilsonia normally reaches 53° and falls to 32°. The record high is 68°, in 1999; the record low 10°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 3.68 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Grant Grove, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
