The Lone Tree 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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76° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1984. Next is 75° in 1989.
Lone Tree’s center stands about 6,000 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,750 ft to 6,340 ft, a difference of 590 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Thomas Hill, about 7,740 ft, 14 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Older gravels and alluviums (gravel, unconsolidated), from the Pleistocene, 0.2 to 1.6 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 16×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Arkose, shale, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Arkose, conglomerate, shale. Age: Paleocene to Eocene, 34 to 66 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, claystone. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, 0.2 to 1.6 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.
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 Lone Tree reaches the Gulf of America by way of Willow Creek, Little Dry Creek, the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,420 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 Lone Tree; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lone Tree has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 86 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Lone Tree normally reaches 52° and falls to 24°. The record high is 73°, in 2007; the record low −5°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.34 in, fell in 1991.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1984 at Strontia Springs Dam, 15 miles west-southwest, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
