The valley in LiDAR

The St. Joseph River Valley

All 12,209 square kilometres that drain to the St. Joseph River, from the hills past Hillsdale to Lake Michigan, built from the U.S. Geological Survey’s laser-made elevation of the ground. The river and its branches are drawn in gold. 10 lost towns are hidden in the hills: find all 10.

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Drag to turn · scroll or pinch to zoom · tap a gold light or a pin

Made in the Project Scroll Studio3D landscapes from public LiDAR surveys, restoration, design and film. Want your town, farm or lake in 3D? Ask the studio

Walk Broadway in 3D › The county seat, built building by building from the same laser survey.

What you are looking at

The whole watershed. The bright land is every acre whose rain ends in the St. Joseph River: parts of fifteen counties in Michigan and Indiana. The darker land around it drains elsewhere: to the Kalamazoo, the Maumee, the Kankakee, or straight to Lake Michigan.
The shape of the ground. The heights come from the U.S. Geological Survey’s 3D Elevation Program, which in this country is made mostly from laser surveys flown county by county. Here the shape of the land is drawn every 200 metres or so, and its light and shade from a grid about 50 metres apart, sharp enough to show the river’s own bluffs and old channels. The heights are raised (×15 to start) because the valley falls only about 200 metres from its eastern hills to the lake. Use the slider to flatten it or raise it further.
What the ice left. The long ridges and knobby hills are moraines, left where the glaciers stood and melted, about 15,000 years ago. The flat, open plains between them are outwash, sand and gravel spread by the meltwater. The river wanders through them both.
Story pins. The gold pins mark where our stories happened, from the Dewey Lake week of 1964 to how Kalamazoo got its name. Press one for the stories told there.
What the ice left. Press it to name the big landforms: the Kalamazoo moraine, which runs through Cassopolis on its way to Kalamazoo and Hastings; the Sturgis moraine, Michigan’s oldest; the Valparaiso moraine along the lake shore; and the flat outwash plains spread by the meltwater. The labels are placed by eye from published maps, near the ground they name, not on a surveyed line.
Railroads. Press it to see the valley’s railroads: the lines still running in pale grey, and in rust the ones that are gone, abandoned or pulled up, many of them now trails.
Fly to Cassopolis. The button flies you down into the county seat and opens Broadway in 3D, where the town is built from every laser point.
The gold lights. Each is the site of a lost town from the county histories. Tap each one. Where only the township or the neighbourhood is known, the light stands near it and its card says “about here.” Find all 10 and the valley is yours: there is a badge for it.

The river’s fall

The St. Joseph River falls about 158 metres (518 feet) on its way to Lake Michigan, most steeply in its first fifty kilometres below Hillsdale. The small blue bars are the dams on the main river today, from the Sturgis Dam near Centreville down to Berrien Springs. Heights are read from the same elevation model, along a simplified line of the river; the river’s own course, with every bend, is longer.

Railroads and dams: OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Sources: U.S. Geological Survey, 3D Elevation Program, bare-earth elevation (public domain); watershed boundary from the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset (HUC 04050001, St. Joseph); rivers and towns from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors. Landforms: Michigan State University, Geography of Michigan, “Moraines”; Wikipedia, “Valparaiso Moraine” and “Kankakee Outwash Plain.” Lost-town sites: USGS place names (Williamsville, Kessington), and the land descriptions in Rogers’s History of Cass County (1875), Ellis’s History of Berrien and Van Buren Counties (1880) and Howard’s History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), placed on the federal land-survey grid. 3D drawing by three.js. See also Broadway in 3D, where the town is built from every laser point.