The Lance Creek 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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Mostly sunny; cooler
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Lance Creek’s center stands about 4,480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,300 ft to 4,750 ft, a difference of 450 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chalk Buttes, about 5,410 ft, 15 miles south-southwest.
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 18×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Claystone, conglomerate. Age: Late Eocene to Early Oligocene, 31 to 35 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 78 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 0.4 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 Lance Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lance Creek, the Cheyenne, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,690 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sharpe, Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark Lake.
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 Lance Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
