The Tool 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; cooler
Partly cloudy; warmer
Sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Tool’s center stands about 350 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 280 ft to 400 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Melton Rock, about 660 ft, 15 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Wills Point Formation (clay), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 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 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.
Clay. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Clay, sand. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Tool reaches Galveston Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Cedar Creek Reservoir, Cedar Creek and the Trinity: about 350 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Woodlands Golf Course Lake and Cedar Creek Reservoir.
150 miles of the trip are on the Trinity.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Tool; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
