The Topaz Lake 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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Showers likely; cooler
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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.
Topaz Lake’s center stands about 5,050 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,970 ft to 8,020 ft, a difference of 3,050 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Silver Peak, about 10,720 ft, 15 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium, undifferentiated (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 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, dacite. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 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 3 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, granite. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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 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. 3 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 Topaz Lake reaches Walker Lake by way of the West Walker and the Walker: about 110 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 Topaz Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Topaz Lake 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 Topaz Lake 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, 16 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
