The Nelson 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly sunny
Nelson’s center stands about 3,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,960 ft to 4,410 ft, a difference of 2,450 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ireteba Peaks, about 5,000 ft, 8 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Younger andesite and intermediate flows and breccias (andesite, dacite), from the Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Basalt, andesite, dacite. Age: Middle Eocene to Late Miocene, 11 to 38 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Andesite, dacite. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss, schist. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Early Miocene to Pleistocene, 2 to 16 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. 2 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 Nelson reaches the Gulf of California by way of Lake Mohave and the Colorado: about 420 river miles.
Lakes on the way: 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 Nelson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
