The Goldfield 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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Goldfield’s center stands about 5,650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,470 ft to 6,440 ft, a difference of 970 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Montezuma Peak, about 8,320 ft, 7 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Younger tuffaceous sedimentary rocks (sedimentary, volcanic), from the Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 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 10 mi of the line.
Volcanic. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Andesite, basalt. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sedimentary, volcanic. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartzite, siltstone, phyllite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 3 smaller units 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 Goldfield reaches the Great Basin by way of Big Wash: about 12 river miles. The Great Basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Often dry. About 70% 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 Goldfield; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
