The Saratoga 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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Saratoga’s center stands about 6,790 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,750 ft to 7,130 ft, a difference of 380 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pennock Mountain, about 10,020 ft, 13 miles east-northeast.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 7×. 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, claystone, conglomerate. Age: Late Miocene, 5.3 to 12 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Archean. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.8 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 Saratoga reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,670 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Seminoe Reservoir and Pathfinder Reservoir.
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 Saratoga; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
