The Paradise 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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Paradise’s center stands about 1,780 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 500 ft to 2,190 ft, a difference of 1,690 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Oak Point, about 5,360 ft, 14 miles northeast.
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 8 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 13 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 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.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Argillite, phyllite. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic to Cretaceous, 66 to 2,500 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. 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 Paradise reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Clear Creek, Dry Creek, Gold Run, Cottonwood Creek, Butte Creek and the Sacramento: about 190 river miles.
140 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Paradise; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
