The Blue Sky 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Blue Sky’s center stands about 4,380 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,260 ft to 4,540 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Judson Hills, about 4,900 ft, 13 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Modern alluvium (unconsolidated), from the Quaternary, 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 40×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Gravel, unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.7 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 Blue Sky reaches the Gulf of America by way of the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,280 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 Blue Sky; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
