The Buck Meadows 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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4.77 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1910. The next wettest, 4.39 inches, fell in 2017.
Buck Meadows’s center stands about 3,050 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,400 ft to 4,120 ft, a difference of 2,720 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pilot Peak, about 5,980 ft, 8 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Paleozoic marine rocks, undivided, unit 4 (Western Sierra Nevada) (argillite, quartzite, phyllite), from the Ordovician to Triassic, 202 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Argillite, quartzite, phyllite. Age: Ordovician to Triassic, 202 to 487 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, greenstone. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Triassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 252 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.5 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 Buck Meadows reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Moore Creek, the North Fork Merced, the Merced, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 220 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake McClure.
120 miles of the trip are on the San Joaquin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Buck Meadows; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Buck Meadows has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. A normal year brings about 51 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 37 inches of water.
On November 14 Buck Meadows normally reaches 57° and falls to 37°. The record high is 75°, in 1942; the record low 19°, in 1964. The most rain on this date, 3.40 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1910 at Hetch Hetchy, 18 miles northeast, 820 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
