The Bear Creek 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
74° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1891. Next is 69° in 2012.
Bear Creek’s center stands about 930 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 590 ft to 1,270 ft, a difference of 680 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Emmet Heights, about 1,340 ft, 9 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Traverse Group (limestone), from the Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million 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 26×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Black-shale, limestone. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 0.9 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 Creek reaches Lake Michigan by way of the Bear River: about 4 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bear Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bear Creek has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 75° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in February. A normal year brings about 124 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Bear Creek normally reaches 44° and falls to 32°. The record high is 63°, in 1999; the record low 13°, in 1933. The most rain on this date, 0.84 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 at Petoskey, 4 miles west-northwest, 330 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
