The Benton 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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Benton’s center stands about 5,390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,290 ft to 6,770 ft, a difference of 1,480 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Dubois, about 13,550 ft, 8 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 2×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Rhyolite. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Rhyolite. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, dolostone. Age: Neoproterozoic to Middle Devonian, 384 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Basanite. Age: Early Pliocene to Late Pliocene, 3 to 4 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Benton reaches Owens Lake by way of Spring Canyon Creek, Fish Slough and the Owens: about 140 river miles. Owens Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
110 miles of the trip are on the Owens.
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.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Benton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
