NVNevada Geography

Most of the rain that falls on Nevada never reaches the sea. Roughly three quarters of the state lies inside the Great Basin, a region with no outlet to any ocean, where rivers run out onto flat valley floors and evaporate. The Humboldt River crosses 330 miles of northern Nevada, the longest river in the entire Great Basin, and finishes in a marsh called the Humboldt Sink. John C. Frémont worked out what was happening in 1844 after crossing the region and finding that nothing drained out of it, and he gave it the name it still carries.

More than three hundred ranges, all facing the same way

Nevada contains over 300 named mountain ranges, more than any other state, and after Alaska it is the most mountainous state in the country. They run in near-parallel lines, north-northeast, typically fifty to a hundred miles long, separated by valleys five to fifteen miles wide. Clarence Dutton, surveying in the 1880s, described them as an army of caterpillars crawling north out of Mexico, and no better summary has appeared since.

The pattern comes from crustal extension that began around seventeen million years ago. As the region was pulled apart, blocks of crust tilted along normal faults. The uplifted edges became ranges and the dropped blocks became basins, which then filled with debris eroded off the ranges beside them. In places the crust here has been stretched to nearly twice its original width, and it is still moving, which is why crossing Nevada on US 50 means climbing and dropping over more than a dozen passes in a single day.

A high point borrowed from California

Nevada's highest ground is Boundary Peak, 13,147 feet, in the White Mountains of Esmeralda County. It is technically a shoulder of Montgomery Peak, 13,441 feet, which stands less than a mile away in California. Nevada's summit exists only because the state line happens to cross that ridge.

The highest mountain wholly inside Nevada is Wheeler Peak, 13,065 feet, in the Snake Range. A cirque on its northeast face holds the only permanent ice in the state, a small rock glacier tucked under 1,500 feet of headwall. Bristlecone pines grow on the slopes below it, and in 1964 a researcher cut one down for sampling that turned out to have close to 4,900 growth rings, the oldest individual tree ever recorded anywhere. Great Basin National Park was created around that ground in 1986.

The low point is 481 feet, on the Colorado River in the Fort Mohave Valley below Laughlin, which gives Nevada a vertical spread of 12,666 feet. Average elevation across the state runs around 5,500 feet, among the highest anywhere in the country.

Lakes with no way out

Thirteen thousand years ago, Lake Lahontan covered roughly 8,500 square miles of northwestern Nevada. Its old shorelines are still legible as horizontal terraces cut into the ranges above Pyramid Lake, hundreds of feet above the present water. Pyramid Lake and Walker Lake are what is left of it.

Pyramid Lake, on the Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation, takes the Truckee River, which begins at Lake Tahoe. After Derby Dam started diverting Truckee water to farmland in 1905, Pyramid dropped roughly eighty feet and its neighbour Winnemucca Lake dried out completely by the late 1930s, taking a national wildlife refuge with it.

Lake Tahoe itself sits at 6,225 feet in a fault-bounded basin between the Sierra Nevada and the Carson Range, 1,645 feet deep, second only to Crater Lake among American lakes. About a third of it is in Nevada. In the far south, the Colorado River is the one major stream that carries Nevada water out of the state, and Hoover Dam, completed in 1935, holds it back as Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States by capacity.

Two boundaries moved by act of Congress

The California line does something no other western boundary does. From Oregon it follows the 120th meridian south to the middle of Lake Tahoe, then abandons the grid entirely and runs as a straight diagonal for roughly 400 miles southeast to the Colorado River. Nearly every other boundary out west is a meridian, a parallel or a river.

The eastern side was redrawn twice after statehood. Congress shifted Nevada's boundary with Utah Territory east in 1862 and again in 1866, taking a degree of longitude each time. Then in 1867 it transferred the wedge of Arizona Territory lying west and south of the Colorado River, which is how Nevada acquired its southern point and, eventually, Las Vegas. Nevada was admitted in 1864 and kept growing for three more years.

Roughly 80 percent of Nevada is federal land, the highest share of any state, most of it Bureau of Land Management rangeland with large military withdrawals in the south. That is not a statistical curiosity: it is the reason Las Vegas grows in tightly drawn increments of released federal acreage rather than sprawling freely.

The driest state, with the numbers to prove it

Nevada averages about 9.5 inches of precipitation a year, less than any other state. The cause sits just outside its western border. Storms coming off the Pacific are forced up the Sierra Nevada, drop more than fifty inches a year along the crest, and arrive in Nevada wrung out. Reno, forty miles east of that crest and two thousand feet lower, averages around 7.5 inches. Las Vegas manages about 4.2.

Temperature records run wide: 125 degrees at Laughlin on 29 June 1994 and minus 50 degrees at San Jacinto on 8 January 1937. Nevada also ranks among the most seismically active states. On 16 December 1954 the Fairview Peak and Dixie Valley earthquakes struck four minutes apart, tearing fresh fault scarps across the desert floor that are still visible from the highway seventy years later.

Nevada geography, answered

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