The Lake Wales 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
Sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
92° on Nov. 11, 2023, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1935. Next is 90° in 1957.
Lake Wales’s center stands about 150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 100 ft to 250 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Iron Mountain, about 330 ft, 2 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cypresshead Formation (sand), from the Late Pliocene, 2.6 to 3.6 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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Pliocene, 2.6 to 3.6 million years old. About 11 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 Lake Wales reaches the Gulf of America by way of Peace Creek and the Peace: about 120 river miles.
110 miles of the trip are on the Peace.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lake Wales; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lake Wales has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 50° in January. About 53 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lake Wales normally reaches 80° and falls to 58°. The record high is 89°, in 2018; the record low 34°, in 1968. The most rain on this date, 2.44 in, fell in 1954.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1935 at Mountain Lake, 3 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
