The Shepherd 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.
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely
Showers likely
Sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Shepherd’s center stands about 150 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 100 ft to 230 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lissie Formation (silt, sand, clay), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 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 59×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Silt, sand, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Shepherd reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Big Creek and the Trinity: about 110 river miles.
90 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Shepherd; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
