The Garden City 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
83° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1967. Next is 80° in 1999.
Garden City’s center stands about 4,700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,610 ft to 4,860 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Antelope Hill, about 4,940 ft, 11 miles northwest.
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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 39×. 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 12 mi of the line.
Gravel, unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
Gravel, unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, 0.2 to 1.6 million years old. About 0.5 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 Garden City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,330 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 Garden City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Garden City has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 35 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 15 inches of water.
On November 14 Garden City normally reaches 54° and falls to 26°. The record high is 78°, in 2025; the record low 4°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.50 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1967 at Greeley Unc, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
