The Colorado Springs 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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78° on Nov. 17, 1981, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 78° in 2016.
Colorado Springs’s center stands about 6,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,860 ft to 6,400 ft, a difference of 540 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pikes Peak, about 14,100 ft, 12 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Gravels and alluviums (gravel, unconsolidated), from the Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old.
The section below crosses 12 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.
Granite, alkali-feldspar-granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Arkose, shale, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, claystone, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 6 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 Colorado Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of 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 Colorado Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Colorado Springs 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 Colorado Springs 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, 7 miles east-southeast, 160 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
