The Sugarloaf 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. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1978. Next is 67° in 2005.
Sugarloaf’s center stands about 7,840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,390 ft to 8,780 ft, a difference of 2,390 ft: mountain country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is North Arapaho Peak, about 13,480 ft, 13 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic rocks of 1700-m.y. age group (granite), from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion 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 3×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss, schist, migmatite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gravel, unconsolidated. Age: Pleistocene, less than 0.5 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 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 Sugarloaf reaches the Gulf of America by way of North Boulder Creek, Boulder Creek, Saint Vrain Creek, the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,400 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 Sugarloaf; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sugarloaf has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 99 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1978 at Gross Reservoir, 6 miles south-southeast, 960 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
