The Brook Forest 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.
−16° on Nov. 13, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is −6° in 1951.
Brook Forest’s center stands about 8,110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 7,570 ft to 10,300 ft, a difference of 2,730 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Blue Sky, about 14,200 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic rocks of 1400-m.y. age group (alkali-feldspar-granite, granite), from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Alkali-feldspar-granite, granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss, schist, migmatite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Arkose, conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Granite, alkali-feldspar-granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.3 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 Brook Forest reaches the Gulf of America by way of Chicken Creek, Bear Creek, the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,440 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 Brook Forest; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Brook Forest has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in December. A normal year brings about 106 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 18 inches of water.
On November 14 Brook Forest normally reaches 45° and falls to 22°. The record high is 68°, in 1999; the record low −2°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.41 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Georgetown, 19 miles west-northwest, 410 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.