The Cree 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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4° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1989. Next is 12° in 1997.
Cree Lake’s center stands about 950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 930 ft to 1,060 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sand Hill, about 1,130 ft, 3 miles east-northeast.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
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.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 6 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 Cree Lake reaches Lake Michigan by way of Little Elkhart Creek and the Saint Joseph: about 150 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 Little Elkhart Creek.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cree Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cree Lake has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 36 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Cree Lake normally reaches 48° and falls to 31°. The record high is 64°, in 2009; the record low 13°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.72 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1989 at Garrett 1 S, 14 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
