The Charlos Heights 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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Charlos Heights’s center stands about 3,750 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,660 ft to 5,020 ft, a difference of 1,360 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is El Capitan, about 9,920 ft, 13 miles southwest.
The section below crosses 12 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granitic. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Quartzite, metasiltstone, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Cretaceous to Tertiary, 2.6 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartzite, metasiltstone, argillite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 6 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 Charlos Heights reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Camas Creek, the Bitterroot, the Clark Fork, the Pend Oreille and the Columbia: about 1,130 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Pend Oreille, Lake Umatilla and Noxon Rapids Reservoir.
460 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Charlos Heights; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
