The Nye 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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Nye’s center stands about 4,830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,740 ft to 7,240 ft, a difference of 2,500 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Wood, about 12,550 ft, 11 miles south.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 2×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Andesite, conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 84 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Archean. About 6 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 1.8 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Age: Archean. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, sandstone-mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 87 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone, black-shale. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Mississippian, 331 to 359 million years old. About 0.3 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 Nye reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Stillwater, the Yellowstone, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 3,190 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sakakawea, Lake Sharpe and Lake Francis Case.
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 Nye; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
