The Butte 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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71° on Nov. 14, 1995, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 70° in 1936.
Butte Meadows’s center stands about 4,390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,750 ft to 5,370 ft, a difference of 1,620 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Butt Mountain, about 7,820 ft, 13 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Tertiary volcanic flow rocks, unit 17 (Cascade Range) (andesite, basalt), from the Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 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 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.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 10 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 Butte Meadows reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Butte Creek and the Sacramento: about 210 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 Meadows; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Butte Meadows has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Butte Meadows normally reaches 50° and falls to 28°. The record high is 71°, in 1995; the record low 6°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 3.35 in, fell in 1981.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Mineral, 19 miles north, 480 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
