The Rye 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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Rye’s center stands about 6,830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,280 ft to 8,990 ft, a difference of 2,710 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Greenhorn Mountain, about 12,320 ft, 5 miles west-southwest.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone, limestone. Age: Jurassic to Cretaceous, 66 to 202 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Rye reaches the Gulf of America by way of Greenhorn Creek, the Saint Charles, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,900 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
960 miles of the trip are on the Arkansas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Rye; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
