The Berry Creek 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.
Berry Creek’s center stands about 2,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 820 ft to 3,130 ft, a difference of 2,310 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Soapstone Hill, about 5,530 ft, 14 miles north-northeast.
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 4 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 12 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 0.3 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 Berry Creek reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Berry Creek, the Feather and the Sacramento: about 170 river miles.
75 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Berry Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.