The Cherry Valley 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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Cherry Valley’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 870 ft to 1,220 ft, a difference of 350 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Saginaw Formation (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 33×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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 Cherry Valley reaches Lake Michigan by way of the Baldwin, Sanborn Creek and the Pere Marquette: about 75 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
60 miles of the trip are on the Pere Marquette.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cherry Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
