The Smith Valley 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
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76° on Nov. 15, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1973. Next is 75° in 1990.
Smith Valley’s center stands about 4,770 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,730 ft to 6,630 ft, a difference of 1,900 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Siegel, about 9,430 ft, 10 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Playa, lake bed, and flood plain deposits (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granitic, granodiorite, quartz-monzonite. Age: Jurassic to Miocene, 5.3 to 202 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Andesite, dacite. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 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.
Volcanic, carbonate, clastic. Age: Middle Triassic to Middle Jurassic, 164 to 247 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. 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 Smith Valley reaches Walker Lake by way of the West Walker and the Walker: about 90 river miles. Walker Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
55 miles of the trip are on the Walker.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Smith Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Smith Valley has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in December. About 6 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Smith Valley normally reaches 56° and falls to 24°. The record high is 71°, in 2016; the record low 10°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.10 in, fell in 1991.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1973 at Smith 6 N, 7 miles north, 230 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
