The McDade 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
Showers likely
Chance of showers; cooler
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
McDade’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 470 ft to 640 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Yegua Knobbs, about 740 ft, 4 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Calvert Bluff Formation (claystone), from the Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old.
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 53×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 4 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.
Sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million 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 McDade reaches the Gulf of America by way of McLaughlin Creek, Big Sandy Creek and the Colorado: about 260 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of McDade; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
