The Golden 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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Golden’s center stands about 390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 360 ft to 500 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is West High Peak, about 1,290 ft, 15 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace Deposits (coarse-detrital, fine-detrital), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 13 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 32×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale, phyllite. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 7 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 Golden reaches the Gulf of America by way of Courthouse Creek, the Little River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 660 river miles.
390 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Golden; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
