The Sheep Springs 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers; cooler
Sheep Springs’s center stands about 5,890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,710 ft to 6,620 ft, a difference of 910 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Two Grey Hills, about 6,500 ft, 10 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Menefee Formation (mudstone, shale, sandstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 72 to 87 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Mudstone, shale, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 87 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 84 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 0.1 million years old. About 0.5 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 Sheep Springs reaches the Gulf of California by way of Sheep Springs Wash, the Chaco, the San Juan and the Colorado: about 1,140 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Powell, Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
290 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sheep Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
