The Benbow 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.
Chance of showers
Showers likely
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Showers likely
Showers likely
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Partly cloudy
Benbow’s center stands about 460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 320 ft to 2,040 ft, a difference of 1,720 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Red Mountain, about 4,070 ft, 13 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Paleocene marine rocks, unit 2 (Northern California) (mudstone, sandstone), from the Paleocene to Late Eocene, 34 to 66 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 7×. 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, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous to Pliocene, 2.6 to 100 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Late Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 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 Benbow reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the South Fork Eel and the Eel: about 80 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Benbow; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
