The Butte Creek Canyon 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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85° on Nov. 11, 1930, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1906. Next is 85° in 1932.
Butte Creek Canyon’s center stands about 1,060 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 310 ft to 1,540 ft, a difference of 1,230 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Flea Mountain, about 4,260 ft, 14 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Tertiary pyroclastic and volcanic mudflow deposits, unit 9 (Cascade Range) (andesite), from the Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 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.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Paleocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit 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 Butte Creek Canyon reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Comanche Creek, Butte Creek and the Sacramento: about 190 river miles.
140 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Butte Creek Canyon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Butte Creek Canyon has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 27 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Butte Creek Canyon normally reaches 65° and falls to 40°. The record high is 80°, in 2025; the record low 26°, in 1994. The most rain on this date, 1.37 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1906 at Chico University Farm, 7 miles west-southwest, 880 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
