The Crystal Bay 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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5.29 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1909. The next wettest, 4.96 inches, fell in 2017.
Crystal Bay’s center stands about 6,400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,220 ft to 8,180 ft, a difference of 1,960 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Rose, about 10,740 ft, 9 miles north-northeast.
The section below crosses 11 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Andesite, dacite. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granitic, granodiorite, quartz-monzonite. Age: Jurassic to Miocene, 5.3 to 202 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. 5 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Crystal Bay reaches Pyramid Lake by way of Lake Tahoe and the Truckee: about 130 river miles. Pyramid Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Lake on the way: Lake Tahoe.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Crystal Bay; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Crystal Bay has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 21° in January. A normal year brings about 179 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 33 inches of water.
On November 14 Crystal Bay normally reaches 48° and falls to 26°. The record high is 65°, in 1990; the record low 5°, in 1915. The most rain on this date, 2.99 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 from the Tahoe City Area threaded record (Tahoe City, 9 miles west-southwest, 170 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
