The Clayton 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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Clayton’s center stands about 610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 530 ft to 1,490 ft, a difference of 960 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Wolf Mountain, about 1,640 ft, 8 miles north-northwest.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 16×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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.
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 Clayton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Kiamichi, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 780 river miles.
Lake on the way: South Lake.
550 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Clayton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
