The Douglas 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; cooler
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely
Douglas’s center stands about 4,840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,780 ft to 5,040 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sheep Mountain, about 6,390 ft, 8 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Fort Union Formation - Lebo Member (shale), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 12×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Claystone, conglomerate. Age: Late Eocene to Early Oligocene, 31 to 35 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, claystone. Age: Late Oligocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 28 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian to Permian, 252 to 542 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. 3 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 Douglas reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,420 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 Douglas; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
