The Casper Mountain 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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Casper Mountain’s center stands about 8,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,170 ft to 8,120 ft, a difference of 1,950 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Muddy Mountain, about 8,290 ft, 5 miles southeast.
The section below crosses 15 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.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 78 to 83 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, claystone, limestone. Age: Middle Jurassic to Early Cretaceous, 100 to 175 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Archean. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, claystone, conglomerate. Age: Late Miocene, 5.3 to 12 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 9 smaller units 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 Casper Mountain reaches the Gulf of America by way of Elkhorn Creek, the North Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,490 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Casper Mountain; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
