The Bagdad plate. Relief from Copernicus GLO-30; rivers and lakes from USGS NHD; watersheds from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset; roads and city limits from Census TIGER 2024.
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Bagdad’s center stands about 2,720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,390 ft to 4,290 ft, a difference of 1,900 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cypress Mountain, about 6,200 ft, 12 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Early Proterozoic granitic rocks (granite, granodiorite, tonalite), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.4 to 1.4 billion years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 32 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Metavolcanic. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 16 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Late Cretaceous to Early Eocene, 50 to 82 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite, tonalite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
Heights from Copernicus GLO-90 (a surface model: it includes buildings and tree canopy); summits from USGS GNIS; rivers from USGS NHDPlus HR; rock from the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation.
A raindrop that lands in Bagdad reaches the Gulf of California by way of Bridle Creek, the Santa Maria, the Bill Williams and the Colorado: about 380 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Havasu.
290 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bagdad; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
