The Willits 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.
Willits’s center stands about 1,370 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,320 ft to 2,270 ft, a difference of 950 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Brushy Mountain, about 4,850 ft, 14 miles north-northeast.
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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous to Pliocene, 2.6 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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 Willits reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Baechtel Creek, Outlet Creek and the Eel: about 150 river miles.
130 miles of the trip are on the Eel.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Willits; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Willits 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 Willits 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, 12 miles east-southeast, 350 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
