Little Pine Mountain is a mountain in
Santa Barbara County, California
Santa Barbara County, California, officially the County of Santa Barbara, is located in Southern California. As of the 2020 census, the population was 448,229. The county seat is Santa Barbara, and the largest city is Santa Maria.
Santa Barba ...
, in the
Los Padres National Forest at the southern edge of the
San Rafael Mountains. It separates the drainages of Oso Creek, which flows into the upper
Santa Ynez River, from the drainage of Santa Cruz Creek, which flows into the middle section of the river via
Lake Cachuma. The mountain is named for a thin grove of
Coulter pines located on the summit.
The mountain is reached by the
Santa Cruz National Recreation Trail, and is a popular day hike and mountain biking route for residents of
Santa Barbara during the winter months. There is a camp at Happy Hollow Spring near the summit.
[
The rocks of the lower slopes of the mountain comes from the ]Franciscan Assemblage
The Franciscan Complex or Franciscan Assemblage is a geologic term for a late Mesozoic terrane of heterogeneous rocks found throughout the California Coast Ranges, and particularly on the San Francisco Peninsula. It was named by geologist Andrew ...
, which creates serpentine soils that support a unique chaparral ecosystem. Large deposits of dark-red cinnabar are exposed above ground. The middle slopes of the mountain are dominated by the Espada Formation
The Espada Formation is a sedimentary rock, sedimentary rock formation widespread in Santa Barbara County, California. Of late Jurassic to Cretaceous age, the unit consists primarily of shale with some interbedded thin layers of sandstone, conglome ...
. The summit largely consists of Matilija Sandstone. There is a small band of Temblor Formation, a Great Valley Sequence
The Great Valley Sequence of California is a -thick group of related geologic formations that are Late Jurassic through Cretaceous in age (150–65 Ma) on the geologic time scale. These sedimentary rocks were deposited during the late Mesozoic ...
unit usually found much farther north, encircling the high ridge of the mountain. North slope outcrops consist largely of Espada Formation rocks, with a band of serpentinite
Serpentinite is a rock composed predominantly of one or more serpentine group minerals, the name originating from the similarity of the texture of the rock to that of the skin of a snake. Serpentinite has been called ''serpentine'' or ''ser ...
splitting the Espada section in half.[Dibblee, T.W., and Ehrenspeck, H.E., ed., 1987, Geologic map of the San Marcos Pass quadrangle, Santa Barbara County, California: Dibblee Geological Foundation, Dibblee Foundation Map DF-08, scale 1:24,000]
References
{{reflist, refs=
[
{{cite gnis , id=6939 , name=Little Pine Mountain , accessdate=2014-09-14]
[
{{cite web , url = http://www.santabarbarahikes.com/hikes/backcountry/littlepine19oaks
, title = Little Pine Mountain and 19 Oaks , publisher = SantaBarbaraHikes.com
, accessdate = 2014-09-12]
San Rafael Mountains
Mountains of Santa Barbara County, California
Los Padres National Forest
Mountains of Southern California