The Steamboat Springs 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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70° on Nov. 11, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 68° in 1933.
Steamboat Springs’s center stands about 6,730 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,640 ft to 8,300 ft, a difference of 1,660 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Ethel, about 11,900 ft, 14 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Browns Park Fm (sandstone, siltstone), from the Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 9 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.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss, schist, migmatite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Alkali-feldspar-granite, granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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. 3 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 Steamboat Springs reaches the Gulf of California by way of the Yampa, the Green River and the Colorado: about 1,530 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Powell, Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Steamboat Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Steamboat Springs has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 4° in January. A normal year brings about 184 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 25 inches of water.
On November 14 Steamboat Springs normally reaches 44° and falls to 17°. The record high is 65°, in 1934; the record low −22°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 1.14 in, fell in 2006.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Steamboat Springs, here, 140 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
