The Onyx 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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Onyx’s center stands about 2,790 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,680 ft to 5,450 ft, a difference of 2,770 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cannell Peak, about 9,460 ft, 14 miles north-northwest.
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 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.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 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 Onyx reaches the Tulare Lake basin by way of Isabella Lake and the Kern: about 90 river miles. The Tulare Lake basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Lake on the way: Isabella Lake.
70 miles of the trip are on the Kern.
A lake that comes back. The bed of Tulare Lake is farmland now; in very wet years it floods again.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Onyx; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
