The Jackson 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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Partly cloudy
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Showers likely; cooler
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Jackson’s center stands about 6,480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,380 ft to 7,490 ft, a difference of 1,110 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Homer Youngs Peak, about 10,550 ft, 14 miles west-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Gravel, from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old.
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 7×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Metasiltstone, argillite, quartzite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Quartzite, argillite, metasiltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Quartzite, argillite, metasiltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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 Jackson reaches the Gulf of America by way of Warm Springs Creek, the Big Hole, the Jefferson, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 3,690 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sakakawea, Lake Fort Peck and Lake Sharpe.
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 Jackson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
