The Salyer 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.
Salyer’s center stands about 630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 480 ft to 3,100 ft, a difference of 2,620 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Brushy Mountain, about 6,170 ft, 15 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Jurassic marine rocks, unit 1 (Western Sierra Nevada and Western Klamath Mountains) (slate, graywacke), from the Triassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 252 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Triassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 252 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Diorite. Age: Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 202 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Melange. Age: Devonian to Jurassic, 145 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Early Cretaceous, 110 to 143 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Peridotite, serpentinite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 1,000 million years old. About 0.3 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 Salyer reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of the South Fork Trinity, the Trinity and the Klamath: about 80 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Salyer; river miles along the main stem, rounded.