The Cornfields 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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Cornfields’s center stands about 6,150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,090 ft to 6,690 ft, a difference of 600 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ganado Mesa, about 6,860 ft, 12 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Chinle Formation (mudstone), from the Late Triassic, 210 to 230 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 20×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Triassic, 210 to 230 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Triassic to Early Jurassic, 180 to 210 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Early Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 160 to 180 million years old. About 0.6 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 Cornfields reaches the Gulf of California by way of Pueblo Colorado Wash, Cottonwood Wash, the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 1,000 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
290 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cornfields; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
