The Yankee Hill 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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Yankee Hill’s center stands about 1,880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 810 ft to 2,380 ft, a difference of 1,570 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Soapstone Hill, about 5,530 ft, 15 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Paleozoic marine rocks, undivided, unit 6 (Northwestern Sierra Nevada) (argillite, phyllite), from the Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 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, phyllite. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Phyllite. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 4 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 Yankee Hill reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Grizzly Creek, the West Branch Feather, the Feather and the Sacramento: about 160 river miles.
75 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Yankee Hill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
