The Morrison 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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−8° on Nov. 13, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1981. Next is 1° in 1997.
Morrison’s center stands about 5,800 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,570 ft to 7,670 ft, a difference of 2,100 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Black Mountain, about 10,730 ft, 14 miles southwest.
The section below crosses 13 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, mudstone, conglomerate. Age: Late Cretaceous to Paleocene, 56 to 100 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Alkali-feldspar-granite, granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss, schist, migmatite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gravel, unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 7 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 Morrison reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bear 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 Morrison; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Morrison has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 76 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 17 inches of water.
On November 14 Morrison normally reaches 56° and falls to 24°. The record high is 82°, in 1990; the record low −5°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.82 in, fell in 1987.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1981 at Wheat Ridge 2, 9 miles north-northeast, 400 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
