The Pine Bluffs 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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Pine Bluffs’s center stands about 5,060 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,980 ft to 5,340 ft, a difference of 360 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Panorama Point, about 5,420 ft, 12 miles south.
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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 38×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gravel. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Claystone, conglomerate. Age: Late Eocene to Early Oligocene, 31 to 35 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 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 Pine Bluffs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lodgepole Creek, the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,340 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 Pine Bluffs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
