The Elkhart 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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Elkhart’s center stands about 390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 300 ft to 580 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Camp Hill, about 660 ft, 5 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cook Mountain Formation (claystone, sandstone), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old.
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 41×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Claystone, sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Elkhart reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Manson Creek and the Trinity: about 280 river miles.
Lake on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake.
120 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Elkhart; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
