The Shasta 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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81° on Nov. 12, 2019, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1960. Next is 80° in 1995.
Shasta’s center stands about 1,060 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 570 ft to 2,020 ft, a difference of 1,450 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bully Choop Mountain, about 6,910 ft, 15 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mesozoic granitic rocks, unit 4 (Klamath Mountains and Northern Sierra Nevada) (granodiorite, trondhjemite), from the Early Devonian to Late Devonian, 364 to 400 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 3×. 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, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Diorite. Age: Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 202 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granodiorite, trondhjemite. Age: Early Devonian to Late Devonian, 364 to 400 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 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 Shasta reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Middle Creek and the Sacramento: about 300 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Shasta; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Shasta has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 99° in July; winter nights fall to about 39° in January. About 63 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Shasta normally reaches 62° and falls to 44°. The record high is 80°, in 1995; the record low 28°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 3.25 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1960 at Whiskeytown Reservoir, 2 miles west-northwest, 240 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
