The Steamboat 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
Chance of showers
Chance of showers; cooler
Steamboat’s center stands about 6,510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,260 ft to 6,800 ft, a difference of 540 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Balakai Point, about 7,440 ft, 7 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cretaceous sedimentary rocks (sandstone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 88 to 97 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 15×. 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. Age: Late Cretaceous, 88 to 97 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, coal. Age: Late Cretaceous, 84 to 88 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, mudstone. Age: Late Jurassic, 145 to 160 million years old. About 0.8 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 Steamboat reaches the Gulf of California by way of Pueblo Colorado Wash, Cottonwood Wash, the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 1,020 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 Steamboat; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
