from gently rolling in the east to strongly sloping in the west. Its watershed contributes to the Wallkill River which flows north and joins the waters of Rondout Creek at Esopus, New York, a short distance before the Rondout flows into the Hudson River near Kingston, New York. Of the Papakating's watershed's acreage, or 27.7% of agricultural land, or 0.8% is barren land, or 42.4% is forested, or 12.4% is urban development, or 15.4% is wetlands, and or 1.3% is water. According to 2002 figures, the watershed was estimated to be home to approximately 11,602 residents of Sussex County. The Papakating Creek watershed is flanked on the west by Kittatinny Mountain and on the east by the watershed of the Wallkill. To the east of the Wallkill River are the mountains of New Jersey's Highlands physiographic province. Kittatinny Valley is underlain by dark shale and limestone of the Martinsburg Formation and has soils that are glacial in origin. The Martinsburg Formation is a two-mile-thick (3.2 km) layer of a thick turbidite sequence of weaker sedimentary materials, mostly slate, greywacke sandstone, shale, and limestone derived from Ordovician-period deep ocean floor deposits (540 to 400 million years ago). The creek's watershed is located in the northern Kittatinny Valley in New Jersey which is a segment of the Great Appalachian Valley, a 1,200-miles (1,900 km) trough spanning from Quebec to Alabama. Elevations within the Kittatinny Valley range from to . In New Jersey, the northern portion of Kittatinny Valley is drained by the watershed of the Wallkill River of which Papakating Creek is a tributary. Its southern portion is drained by Paulins Kill and Pequest River. The watersheds of northern and southern Kittatinny Valley are divided by a glacial moraine. The Papakating valley's topography and surficial geology is defined by stratified and unstratified drift as well as till and gravel deposits left behind by the retreating glaciers during the Wisconsin glaciation (the last ice age) and feature several kames and kame terraces. A unique feature in the watershed is Rutan Hill, also called Volcanic Hill, thought to be the throat of an ancient, extinct volcano which was active at the end of the Taconic Orogeny approximately 420 million years ago. This nondescript hill in the Beemerville section of Wantage Township, is the surface expression of a lamprophyric diatreme that is the northern part of the Late Ordovician Beemerville Alkaline Complex that also includes