The Blue Valley 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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60° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1968. Next is 58° in 1980.
Blue Valley’s center stands about 9,340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 7,690 ft to 11,250 ft, a difference of 3,560 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Blue Sky, about 14,200 ft, 11 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Biotitic gneiss, schist, and migmatite (biotite-gneiss, schist, migmatite), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old.
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 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss, schist, migmatite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 0.6 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 Blue Valley reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Bear Creek, Clear Creek, the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,430 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 Blue Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blue Valley has a subarctic climate. Summer afternoons average 69° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 154 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 22 inches of water.
On November 14 Blue Valley normally reaches 40° and falls to 19°. The record high is 58°, in 1990; the record low −8°, in 1997. The most rain on this date, 0.39 in, fell in 1983.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1968 at Cabin Creek, 12 miles west-southwest, 680 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
