The Crested Butte 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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65° on Nov. 15, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 63° in 1939.
Crested Butte’s center stands about 8,920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 8,830 ft to 11,560 ft, a difference of 2,730 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Castle Peak, about 14,160 ft, 12 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Glacial drift (unconsolidated), from the Pleistocene, less than 0.5 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 4×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Mafic-hypabyssal, felsic-hypabyssal. Age: Eocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 56 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Arkose, siltstone, conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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 Crested Butte reaches the Gulf of California by way of the East River, the Gunnison and the Colorado: about 1,340 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Powell, Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Crested Butte; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Crested Butte has a subarctic climate. Summer afternoons average 76° in July; winter nights fall to about −6° in January. A normal year brings about 203 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
On November 14 Crested Butte normally reaches 40° and falls to 10°. The record high is 60°, in 1999; the record low −19°, in 1915. The most rain on this date, 0.78 in, fell in 2006.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Crested Butte, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
