The Cimarron Hills 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.
78° on Nov. 17, 1981, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 78° in 2016.
Cimarron Hills’s center stands about 6,450 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,120 ft to 6,690 ft, a difference of 570 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Garfield, about 10,910 ft, 14 miles west-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 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. 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 7 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Arkose, conglomerate, shale. Age: Paleocene to Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Cimarron Hills reaches the Gulf of America by way of East Fork Sand Creek, Fountain Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,910 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Arkansas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cimarron Hills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cimarron Hills has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 32 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 16 inches of water.
On November 14 Cimarron Hills normally reaches 54° and falls to 26°. The record high is 77°, in 1936; the record low −12°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.40 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 from the Colorado Springs Area threaded record (Colorado Springs Municipal Airport, 3 miles south, 270 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.