The Bark Ranch 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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Bark Ranch’s center stands about 8,560 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 7,180 ft to 8,980 ft, a difference of 1,800 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Longs Peak, about 14,220 ft, 13 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic rocks of 1700-m.y. age group (granite), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old.
The section below crosses 13 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.
Alkali-feldspar-granite, granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss, schist, migmatite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granitic, dioritic. Age: Late Cretaceous to Middle Eocene, 40 to 72 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 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. 7 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Bark Ranch reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little James Creek, Left Hand Creek, Saint Vrain Creek, the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,400 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bark Ranch; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
