The Elm Creek 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
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Elm Creek’s center stands about 750 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 690 ft to 860 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chapotal Hill, about 920 ft, 7 miles east-northeast.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. 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, claystone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 72 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 84 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 0.4 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 0.3 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 Elm Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Elm Creek and the Rio Grande: about 500 river miles.
Lake on the way: Paz Ramirez Lake.
270 miles of the trip are on the Rio Grande.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Elm Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
