The Cimarron 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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Cimarron’s center stands about 6,420 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,300 ft to 7,500 ft, a difference of 1,200 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Phillips, about 11,730 ft, 14 miles west.
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 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.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 90 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 0.1 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Granitic, gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.7 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1.0 mi of the line.
Granitic, syenitic. Age: Eocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 56 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, limestone. Age: Middle Jurassic to Late Jurassic, 145 to 175 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 Cimarron reaches the Gulf of America by way of Ponil Creek, the Cimarron, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,930 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Conchas Lake, Murray Lake, Ozark Lake and Ute Reservoir.
720 miles of the trip are on the Canadian.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cimarron; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
