The Boulder 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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89° on Nov. 15, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1937. Next is 89° in 2019.
Boulder Creek’s center stands about 510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 450 ft to 2,630 ft, a difference of 2,180 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Thayer, about 3,450 ft, 11 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Miocene marine rocks (sandstone, mudstone), from the Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 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 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, quartz-monzonite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Oligocene, 23 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Greenstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 0.9 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 Boulder Creek reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the San Lorenzo: about 17 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Boulder Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Boulder Creek has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in August; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Boulder Creek normally reaches 72° and falls to 40°. The record high is 88°, in 2021; the record low 27°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 3.42 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1937 at Ben Lomond No. 4, 3 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
