The El Dorado Hills 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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El Dorado Hills’s center stands about 780 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 360 ft to 1,260 ft, a difference of 900 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Thompson Hill, about 2,040 ft, 11 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mesozoic volcanic rocks, unit 2 (Western Sierra Foothills and Western Klamath Mountains) (mafic-volcanic), from the Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 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 El Dorado Hills reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Carson Creek, Deer Creek, the Cosumnes, the Mokelumne, the South Mokelumne, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 90 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of El Dorado Hills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
