The Red Feather Lakes 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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−18° on Nov. 13, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1993. Next is −4° in 1997.
Red Feather Lakes’s center stands about 8,360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 7,610 ft to 8,980 ft, a difference of 1,370 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Crown Point, about 11,420 ft, 13 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic rocks of 1400-m.y. age group (alkali-feldspar-granite, granite), from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Alkali-feldspar-granite, granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 0.7 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 Red Feather Lakes reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lone Pine Creek, the North Fork Cache La Poudre, the Cache la Poudre, 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 Red Feather Lakes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Red Feather Lakes has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in February. A normal year brings about 73 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 13 inches of water.
On November 14 Red Feather Lakes normally reaches 44° and falls to 22°. The record high is 64°, in 1999; the record low −15°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.15 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1993 at Rustic 9 WSW, 9 miles southwest, 660 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
