The Kirkwood 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.
Mostly sunny
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Showers likely; cooler
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Kirkwood’s center stands about 7,720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,840 ft to 9,370 ft, a difference of 2,530 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Freel Peak, about 10,840 ft, 14 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mesozoic granitic rocks, unit 3 (Sierra Nevada, Death Valley area, Northern Mojave Desert and Transverse Ranges) (granodiorite), from the Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. 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 15 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Late Oligocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 24 million years old. About 9 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 Kirkwood reaches San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean by way of Caples Creek, the Silver Fork American, the South Fork American and the Sacramento: about 170 river miles.
Lake on the way: Folsom Lake.
55 miles of the trip are on the Sacramento.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Kirkwood; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
