The McKinleyville 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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Mostly cloudy
78° on Nov. 12, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is 74° in 2018.
McKinleyville’s center stands about 140 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 610 ft, a difference of 610 ft: hilly country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Mountain, about 3,170 ft, 13 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Older Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Early Cretaceous, 110 to 143 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Quaternary, 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 McKinleyville reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Widow White Creek and Norton Creek: about 2 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of McKinleyville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
McKinleyville has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 65° in September; winter nights fall to about 40° in December. About 46 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 McKinleyville normally reaches 59° and falls to 42°. The record high is 67°, in 2001; the record low 29°, in 1993. The most rain on this date, 0.59 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Arcata Eureka Airport, 2 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
