The Rolling Hills 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
Rolling Hills’s center stands about 5,340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,960 ft to 5,570 ft, a difference of 610 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gumbo Hill, about 6,110 ft, 11 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dune sand and loess (sand, unconsolidated), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 13×. 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 5 mi of the line.
Sand, unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Claystone, conglomerate. Age: Late Eocene to Early Oligocene, 31 to 35 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 1 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 Rolling Hills reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,460 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 Rolling Hills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
