The Fort Carson 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.
Fort Carson’s center stands about 5,670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,520 ft to 5,990 ft, a difference of 470 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Rosa, about 11,440 ft, 12 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale--Middle unit, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 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.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Granite, alkali-feldspar-granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gravel, unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, 0.2 to 1.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion 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. 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 Fort Carson reaches the Gulf of America by way of Fountain Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,900 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 Fort Carson; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fort Carson 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 Fort Carson 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, 9 miles north-northeast, 510 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
