The Pescadero 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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82° on Nov. 16, 2008, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1939. Next is 80° in 2005.
Pescadero’s center stands about 30 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 0 ft to 1,110 ft, a difference of 1,110 ft: steep hill country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Mountain, about 2,810 ft, 14 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 8×. 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 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Middle Miocene, 12 to 15 million years old. About 0.8 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 Pescadero reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Butano Creek: about 2 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Pescadero; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pescadero has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 66° in August; winter nights fall to about 43° in January. About 26 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Pescadero normally reaches 63° and falls to 45°. The record high is 76°, in 2021; the record low 34°, in 2022. The most rain on this date, 1.80 in, fell in 1953.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1939 at Half Moon Bay, 15 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
