The Pike 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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80° on Nov. 14, 1995, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 77° in 1949.
Pike’s center stands about 3,490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,110 ft to 4,280 ft, a difference of 2,170 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Fir Cap, about 6,480 ft, 15 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Undivided pre-Cenozoic metavolcanic rocks, unit 2 (undivided) (mafic-volcanic, greenstone), from the Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 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 7 mi of the line.
Argillite, phyllite. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, greenstone. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old. About 1 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 Pike reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Grizzly Creek, Oregon Creek, the Middle Yuba, the Yuba, the Feather and the Sacramento: about 160 river miles.
75 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Pike; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pike has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. A normal year brings about 82 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 82 inches of water.
On November 14 Pike normally reaches 58° and falls to 34°. The record high is 80°, in 1995; the record low 18°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 5.28 in, fell in 1963.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Strawberry Valley 2, 11 miles northwest, 220 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
