The Oak Creek Canyon 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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Oak Creek Canyon’s center stands about 5,490 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,760 ft to 7,020 ft, a difference of 2,260 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mormon Mountain, about 8,510 ft, 14 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Permian sedimentary rocks (sandstone, limestone), from the Permian, 270 to 280 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 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.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Middle Pennsylvanian to Permian, 280 to 310 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Late Miocene to Early Pliocene, 4 to 8 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Permian, 270 to 280 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basalt. Age: Early Miocene to Late Miocene, 8 to 16 million 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 Oak Creek Canyon reaches the Gulf of California by way of Oak Creek, the Verde, the Salt River, the Gila and the Colorado: about 550 river miles.
200 miles of the trip are on the Gila.
Often dry. About 40% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
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 Oak Creek Canyon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
