The Nogal 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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Nogal’s center stands about 6,480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,170 ft to 7,800 ft, a difference of 1,630 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sierra Blanca Peak, about 11,920 ft, 14 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Middle Tertiary volcanic rocks, undifferentiated (andesite, dacite), from the Late Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 38 million years old.
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.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 94 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Granitic, syenitic. Age: Eocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 56 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Andesite, dacite. Age: Late Eocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 38 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, shale. Age: Tertiary Paleogene, 23 to 66 million years old. About 0.4 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 Nogal reaches the desert basins of the Rio Grande country by way of Nogal Creek, Nogal Arroyo and Salt Creek: about 85 river miles. The desert basins of the Rio Grande country has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
55 miles of the trip are on Nogal Arroyo.
Often dry. About 90% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Nogal; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
