His earliest California ancestor was Captain José de la Guerra y Noriega, the Comandante of the Presidio of Santa Barbara.

Some of colleagues report that during these trips, he would sleep in his car and take little more than a couple of loaves of bread and a jar of peanut butter.

When he submitted one expense account totaling $14.92 for one such mapping project, his Richfield Oil supervisor objected that he couldn't have even fed himself for that amount, to which Dibblee replied: "Oh, I find lots of things I like to eat up in the hills.

In 1953 he and co-worker Mason Hill published a paper proposing 350 miles (560 km) of lateral movement along the San Andreas Fault.

Dibblee retired from the USGS in 1977, and the following year began mapping the geology of the Los Padres National Forest as a volunteer.