The Tres Pinos 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.
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
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Mostly sunny
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Partly cloudy
86° on Nov. 12, 1990, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 86° in 1995.
Tres Pinos’s center stands about 530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 370 ft to 1,200 ft, a difference of 830 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Laveaga Peak, about 3,730 ft, 11 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Older Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite, quartz-monzonite. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Miocene to Late Miocene, 9.5 to 13 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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 Tres Pinos reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Tres Pinos Creek, the San Benito and the Pajaro: about 40 river miles.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Tres Pinos; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Tres Pinos has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in August; winter nights fall to about 38° in December. About 14 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Tres Pinos normally reaches 67° and falls to 42°. The record high is 81°, in 1992; the record low 30°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 2.00 in, fell in 2025.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Hollister 2, 7 miles northwest, 260 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
