The Gatesville 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.
Chance of showers
Showers likely; cooler
Chance of showers
Sunny; warmer
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Gatesville’s center stands about 800 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 740 ft to 1,020 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Shell Mountains, about 1,210 ft, 10 miles southwest.
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 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.
Limestone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, claystone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 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.
Limestone, marl. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 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 Gatesville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Stillhouse Branch, the Leon, the Little River and the Brazos: about 520 river miles.
Lake on the way: Belton Lake.
320 miles of the trip are on the Brazos.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gatesville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
