The Wells 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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Wells’s center stands about 5,630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,580 ft to 6,190 ft, a difference of 610 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hole in the Mountain Peak, about 11,250 ft, 14 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium, undifferentiated (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 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.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sedimentary, volcanic. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Age: Archean to Tertiary Paleogene. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Early Mississippian to Middle Pennsylvanian, 307 to 359 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 1.0 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone, quartzite. Age: Cambrian to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 497 million years old. About 0.7 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 Wells reaches the Great Basin by way of the Humboldt: about 470 river miles. The Great Basin has no outlet to the sea: the water leaves only by evaporating or soaking into the ground.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Wells; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
