The Concow 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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Concow’s center stands about 1,800 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 920 ft to 2,900 ft, a difference of 1,980 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Soapstone Hill, about 5,530 ft, 14 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Paleozoic marine rocks, undivided, unit 6 (Northwestern Sierra Nevada) (argillite, phyllite), from the Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Mafic-volcanic. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Argillite, phyllite. Age: Permian to Jurassic, 145 to 299 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Phyllite. Age: Paleozoic to Mesozoic, 66 to 542 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. 2 smaller units 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 Concow reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Concow Creek, the West Branch Feather, the Feather and the Sacramento: about 170 river miles.
75 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Concow; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
