The Phillipsville 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.
Phillipsville’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 220 ft to 2,450 ft, a difference of 2,230 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Signal Peak, about 5,820 ft, 15 miles northeast.
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 5 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.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Late Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous to Pliocene, 2.6 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Miocene to Pleistocene, less than 23 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Serpentinite. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 175 million years old. About 0.8 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 Phillipsville reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the South Fork Eel and the Eel: about 60 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Phillipsville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.