Pauba Valley is a

valley A valley is an elongated low area often running between hills or mountains and typically containing a river or stream running from one end to the other. Most valleys are formed by erosion of the land surface by rivers or streams over ...

along the course of

Temecula Creek Temecula Creek, formerly known as the Temecula River, runs U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed March 16, 2011 through southern Riverside County, California, United States, pa ...

, in

Riverside County, California Riverside County is a County (United States), county located in the Southern California, southern portion of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census, its population was 2,418,185, making it the fourth-most ...

. It heads to the east at , the mouth of the

gorge A canyon (; archaic British English spelling: ''cañon''), gorge or chasm, is a deep cleft between escarpments or cliffs resulting from weathering and the erosion, erosive activity of a river over geologic time scales. Rivers have a natural tend ...

of Temecula Creek Canyon at the foot of Oak Mountain. Its mouth in the west is at an elevation of , where it joins the

Elsinore Trough The Elsinore Trough is a graben rift valley in Riverside County, southern California. It is created by the Elsinore Fault Zone. It is located between the Santa Ana Mountains to the west, and the Temescal Mountains of the Perris Block and the Tem ...

at the confluence of Wolf Valley and

Temecula Valley The Temecula Valley (Spanish language, Spanish: ''Valle de Temecula'') is a graben rift valley in western Riverside County, California. The Temecula Valley is one of the graben valleys making up the Elsinore Trough, created by the Elsinore Fau ...

. The valley is bounded on the north and southwest by hills of the ancient eroding sediments of the

Temecula Basin Temecula Basin is a sedimentary basin, which, along with the Aguanga Basin, is part of the Elsinore Fault Zone, in southwestern Riverside County, California. The Temecula Basin is a basin of down faulted Mesozoic basement rock, overlain by late C ...

and on the northeast and southeast by Oak Mountain.

References

Further reading