The Caliente 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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Caliente’s center stands about 4,400 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,320 ft to 5,580 ft, a difference of 1,260 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chokecherry Mountain, about 8,000 ft, 13 miles west-southwest.
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.
Andesite, dacite, quartz-latite. Age: Oligocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 34 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 5.3 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Quartzite, siltstone, phyllite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sedimentary, volcanic. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Oligocene to Early Miocene, 16 to 34 million years old. About 0.6 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 Caliente reaches the Gulf of California by way of Meadow Valley Wash, the Muddy and the Colorado: about 600 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, 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 Caliente; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
