The Big Piney 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.
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Big Piney’s center stands about 6,830 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,740 ft to 7,020 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cretaceous Mountain, about 8,570 ft, 13 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium and Colluvium (clay, silt, sand), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 17×. 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, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Mudstone, conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Paleocene to Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Oil-shale, marlstone, mudstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 5 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 Big Piney reaches the Gulf of California by way of North Piney Creek, the Green River and the Colorado: about 1,600 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Powell, Flaming Gorge Reservoir and Lake Mohave.
410 miles of the trip are on the Green River.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Big Piney; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
