The Vernon 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
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Vernon’s center stands about 3,940 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,800 ft to 3,970 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Eolian deposits (sand, silt), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 32×. 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 18 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 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 Vernon reaches the Gulf of America by way of North Fork Black Wolf Creek, Black Wolf Creek, the Arikaree, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,170 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Harlan County Lake and Swanson Lake.
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 Vernon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
