The Swall Meadows 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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Swall Meadows’s center stands about 6,550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,970 ft to 11,380 ft, a difference of 6,410 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Morgan, about 13,660 ft, 9 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Quaternary alluvium and marine deposits (coarse-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 2×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Rhyolite. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Granodiorite. Age: Permian to Tertiary, 2.6 to 260 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Hornfels, marble. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 273 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Diorite, gabbro. Age: Triassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 252 million years old. About 0.1 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 Swall Meadows reaches Owens Lake by way of Lower Rock Creek and the Owens: about 130 river miles. Owens Lake has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Swall Meadows; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
