The Old Station 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.
Old Station’s center stands about 4,380 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,130 ft to 5,850 ft, a difference of 1,720 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lassen Peak, about 10,370 ft, 13 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Recent (Holocene) volcanic flow rocks, unit 1 (Cascade Volcanic Field) (dacite, andesite), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Dacite, andesite. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 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 Old Station reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Hat Creek, the Pit and the Sacramento: about 410 river miles.
310 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Old Station; river miles along the main stem, rounded.