The Oak Shores 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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89° on Nov. 17, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 89° in 2025.
Oak Shores’s center stands about 1,230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 770 ft to 1,800 ft, a difference of 1,030 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pine Mountain, about 3,610 ft, 8 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Miocene marine rocks (sandstone, mudstone), from the Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 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 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: Oligocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 34 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Oligocene to Pleistocene, less than 34 million years old. About 0.8 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 Oak Shores reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Lake Nacimiento and the Salinas: about 130 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Nacimiento.
110 miles of the trip are on the Salinas.
Often dry. About 70% 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 Oak Shores; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Oak Shores has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in August; winter nights fall to about 32° in December. About 15 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Oak Shores normally reaches 70° and falls to 37°. The record high is 86°, in 2019; the record low 16°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 2.21 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Paso Robles, 19 miles east-southeast, 500 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
