The Big 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.
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Big Creek’s center stands about 4,930 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,590 ft to 7,900 ft, a difference of 4,310 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Givens, about 10,610 ft, 12 miles east-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 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 2×. 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 21 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 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 Big Creek reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Big Creek, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 320 river miles.
Lake on the way: Millerton Lake.
260 miles of the trip are on the San Joaquin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
