The Sierra City 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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3.25 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1915. The next wettest, 3.16 inches, fell in 1981.
Sierra City’s center stands about 4,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,950 ft to 7,890 ft, a difference of 3,940 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sierra Buttes, about 8,430 ft, 2 miles north-northwest.
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 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Argillite, quartzite, phyllite. Age: Ordovician to Triassic, 202 to 487 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic, felsic-volcanic. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 260 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Devonian to Permian, 252 to 422 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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. 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 Sierra City reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of the North Yuba, the Yuba, the Feather and the Sacramento: about 190 river miles.
Lake on the way: New Bullards Bar Reservoir.
75 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sierra City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sierra City has a dry-summer warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 38 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 23 inches of water.
On November 14 Sierra City normally reaches 53° and falls to 24°. The record high is 74°, in 1929; the record low −1°, in 1915. The most rain on this date, 1.15 in, fell in 1952.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1915 at Portola, 19 miles north-northeast, 650 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
