The Bear 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
Mostly sunny
Showers likely; cooler
Sunny
Showers likely
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
Bear Valley’s center stands about 7,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,240 ft to 8,350 ft, a difference of 2,110 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Round Top, about 10,290 ft, 14 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mesozoic granitic rocks, unit 3 (Sierra Nevada, Death Valley area, Northern Mojave Desert and Transverse Ranges) (granodiorite), from the Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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 17 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
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 Bear Valley reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the North Fork Stanislaus, the Stanislaus, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 200 river miles.
90 miles of the trip are on the Stanislaus.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bear Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
