The Bonesteel 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.
Partly cloudy
Sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
Bonesteel’s center stands about 1,970 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,690 ft to 2,030 ft, a difference of 340 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ogallala Group (sandstone, limestone, siltstone), from the Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 25×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, bentonite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, siltstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 6 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 Bonesteel reaches the Gulf of America by way of Ponca Creek, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,070 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lewis and Clark Lake.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bonesteel; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
