The source is at an elevation of 1,100 feet (340 m) near Mount Gretna Heights in Lebanon County. The mouth is the confluence with the Susquehanna River at an elevation of 230 feet (70 m) at Marietta in Lancaster County.[2]
Name
The name of the creek comes from the LenapeChiquesalunga, meaning "place of crayfish".[3]
The United States Geological Survey Board on Geographic Names has made three official decisions on the name of the creek, deciding it was Chickies Creek in 1896 and 1916 before changing it to Chiques Creek in 2002. The USGS Geographic Names Information System recognizes the following thirteen variant names for the creek: Big Chickies Creek, Big Chiques Creek, Big Chiquesalunga Creek, Chickesalapga Creek, Chickeswalungo Creek, Chickies Creek, Chickisalungo Creek, Chicques Creek, Chikiswalunga Creek, Chikiswalungo Creek, Chiquasatunga Creek, Chiquesatonga Creek, and Chiquesatunga Creek.[4]
Course and watershed
Chiques Creek flows generally south for its entire course. The Chickies Creek watershed has a total area of 126 square miles (330 km2) and is part of the larger Chesapeake Baydrainage basin. Chiques Creek's major tributary is Little Chiques Creek, entering roughly one mile upstream its mouth. (hence the variant names with Big in them for the main creek).[5]
Covered bridges
Five covered bridges cross the creek in Lancaster County:
^U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline data. The National MapArchived 2012-03-29 at the Wayback Machine, accessed August 8, 2011
^Shaw, Lewis C. Pennsylvania Gazetteer of Streams Part II (Water Resources Bulletin No. 16). Prepared in Cooperation with the United States Department of the Interior Geological Survey (1st ed.). Harrisburg, PA: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Environmental Resources (no ISBN).
