Big Canyon Creek is a creek in
Lake County, California
Lake County is a county located in the north central portion of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 68,163. The county seat is Lakeport. The county takes its name from Clear Lake, the dominant geographic fe ...
. It is a tributary of
Putah Creek
Putah Creek (Patwin: ''Liwaito'') is a major stream in Northern California, a tributary of the Yolo Bypass, and ultimately, the Sacramento River. The creek has its headwaters in the Mayacamas Mountains, a part of the Coast Range, and flow ...
.
Hydrology
Big Canyon Creek is an long tributary of Putah Creek.
Its mouth is at an elevation of .
Big Canyon Creek supplies rainfall to the Putah Creek drainage with very little snowmelt or base flow.
It does not contain any reservoirs to provide surface storage and regulate flows.
In 1912 Warden R. L. Sinkey wrote of Putah Creek, "Becomes dry anywhere below
Winters during the summer months. Putah Creek is just a small stream in the summertime. St. Helena Creek, Anderson Creek, Dry Creek run just small streams. Big Canyon Creek runs more water, I think, than all the rest".
Location
The
Köppen climate classification
The Köppen climate classification is one of the most widely used climate classification systems. It was first published by German-Russian climatologist Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940) in 1884, with several later modifications by Köppen, notabl ...
is Csb : Warm-summer Mediterranean climate.
Boggs Mountain
Boggs Mountain is a mountain the Mayacamas Mountains in Lake County, California. Part of the mountain holds the Boggs Mountain Demonstration State Forest. About 80% of the trees were burned in the September 2015 Valley Fire.
Name
In the early day ...
is an elongated rolling highland.
It forms a topographical divide separating Big Canyon Creek to the east from
Kelsey Creek to the west.
Adams Springs
Adams is an unincorporated community in Lake County, California.
It was formerly Adams Springs, a summer resort developed around a small group of mineral water springs.
Springs
The Adams Springs are beside Big Canyon Creek.
They are south of ...
is beside the creek, near its head.
William Robert Prather, who developed Adams Springs, corresponded with
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventio ...
in the late 1890s, who told him how to build a
Pelton wheel
The Pelton wheel or Pelton Turbine is an impulse-type water turbine invented by American inventor Lester Allan Pelton in the 1870s. The Pelton wheel extracts energy from the impulse of moving water, as opposed to water's dead weight like the trad ...
in Big Canyon Creek to generate electricity for the resort.
Big Canyon Road (107) runs along the lower part of the creek.
There is a steel bridge that carries the road across the creek below the point where it is joined by Bad Creek.
It was built in 1930 and reconstructed in 1993.
As of November 2017 it was in poor condition and its structure had been appraised as "basically intolerable requiring high priority of replacement".
Tributaries
See also
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Rivers of Lake County, California
Rivers and creeks in Lake County, California are listed below by river basin and alphabetically.
Unless otherwise stated, the information is taken from the Geographic Names Information System maintained by the United States Geological Survey.
Co ...
Notes
Sources
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Rivers of Lake County, California
Mayacamas Mountains