The Encinal 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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Encinal’s center stands about 560 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 480 ft to 620 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cerrito Prieto, about 760 ft, 10 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Laredo Formation (sandstone, claystone), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 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 42×. 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: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Claystone, sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.6 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 Encinal reaches Corpus Christi Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Los Olmos Creek and the Nueces: about 210 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Corpus Christi.
110 miles of the trip are on the Nueces.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Encinal; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
