The Bear Lake 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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0° on Nov. 11, 2007, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 3° in 2019.
Bear Lake’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 890 ft to 1,000 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Diamond Hill, about 1,090 ft, 8 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Antrim Shale (black-shale), from the Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 24 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 Bear Lake reaches Lake Michigan by way of Correll Creek, the South Branch Elkhart and the Saint Joseph: about 140 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
75 miles of the trip are on the Saint Joseph.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bear Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bear Lake has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 21 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 39 inches of water.
On November 14 Bear Lake normally reaches 49° and falls to 32°. The record high is 70°, in 1989; the record low 0°, in 2007. The most rain on this date, 1.78 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Columbia City, 13 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
