The Cherry Creek 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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80° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 79° in 1990.
Cherry Creek’s center stands about 5,640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,450 ft to 5,770 ft, a difference of 320 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Cherokee Mountain, about 6,640 ft, 13 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Eolian deposits (sand, silt), from the Quaternary, less than 2.6 million 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 15×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Arkose, conglomerate, shale. Age: Paleocene to Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Arkose, shale, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Gravel, unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, claystone. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 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 Cherry Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Cherry Creek, the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,410 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 Cherry Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cherry Creek has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 49 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 15 inches of water.
On November 14 Cherry Creek normally reaches 56° and falls to 26°. The record high is 79°, in 1990; the record low −5°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1994.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Denver-Central Park, 9 miles north, 360 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
