The Potter Valley 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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86° on Nov. 12, 2019, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1937. Next is 80° in 1949.
Potter Valley’s center stands about 940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 900 ft to 2,980 ft, a difference of 2,080 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Big Signal Peak, about 6,140 ft, 14 miles north.
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 7 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.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Early Cretaceous, 110 to 143 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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.
Siltstone-mudstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 113 to 145 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Potter Valley reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the East Fork Russian and the Russian: about 110 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Potter Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Potter Valley has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 35° in January. About 45 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Potter Valley normally reaches 65° and falls to 38°. The record high is 80°, in 1995; the record low 25°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 1.70 in, fell in 1967.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1937 at Potter Valley Powerhouse, 3 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
