The Mount Laguna 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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Mount Laguna’s center stands about 5,830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,690 ft to 6,170 ft, a difference of 3,480 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cuyamaca Peak, about 6,480 ft, 12 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pre-Cenozoic granitic and metamorphic rocks undivided (plutonic, gneiss), from the Paleoproterozoic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 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 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.
Tonalite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 175 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Pelitic-schist. Age: Triassic, 202 to 252 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Plutonic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Mount Laguna reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Pine Valley Creek, Cottonwood Creek and the Tijuana: about 65 river miles.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mount Laguna; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
