The Forest 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.
Forest Meadows’s center stands about 3,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,220 ft to 3,880 ft, a difference of 2,660 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Blue Mountain, about 6,020 ft, 12 miles north.
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 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.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Argillite, quartzite, phyllite. Age: Ordovician to Triassic, 202 to 487 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, marble. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, greenstone. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 0.1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
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 Forest Meadows reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of San Domingo Creek, the South Fork Calaveras, the Calaveras, the San Joaquin and New York Slough: about 110 river miles.
Lake on the way: New Hogan Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Forest Meadows; river miles along the main stem, rounded.