The Mossyrock 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.
Mossyrock’s center stands about 650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 420 ft to 1,830 ft, a difference of 1,410 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is The Rockies, about 4,280 ft, 10 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace deposits (gravel, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Andesite, basaltic-andesite. Age: Late Eocene, 34 to 38 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Miocene to Early Pliocene, 3.6 to 16 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Andesite. Age: Late Eocene to Early Oligocene, 28 to 38 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gravel, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. 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. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Mossyrock reaches the Pacific Ocean by way of Klickitat Creek, the Cowlitz and the Columbia: about 130 river miles.
65 miles of the trip are on the Columbia.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mossyrock; river miles along the main stem, rounded.