The Gardnerville Ranchos 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
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Showers likely; cooler
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79° on Nov. 17, 1995, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 77° in 1990.
Gardnerville Ranchos’s center stands about 4,860 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,720 ft to 5,270 ft, a difference of 550 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Freel Peak, about 10,840 ft, 9 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Older gravels (gravel, sand), from the Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 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 7 mi of the line.
Sedimentary, volcanic. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Volcanic, carbonate, clastic. Age: Middle Triassic to Middle Jurassic, 164 to 247 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 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 Gardnerville Ranchos reaches the Great Basin by way of the Carson: about 140 river miles. The Great Basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Lake on the way: Lahontan Reservoir.
65 miles of the trip are on the Carson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gardnerville Ranchos; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gardnerville Ranchos has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 22 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 9 inches of water.
On November 14 Gardnerville Ranchos normally reaches 58° and falls to 23°. The record high is 75°, in 1995; the record low 0°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Minden, 5 miles north-northwest, 150 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
