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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5° on Nov. 17, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1898. Next is 11° in 1933.
Bear Lake’s center stands about 840 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 760 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 290 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Buck Hills, about 1,150 ft, 10 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ellsworth Shale, from the Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 34×. 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: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 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.
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 Little Bear Creek, Bear Creek and the Manistee: about 45 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 Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bear Lake has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 93 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Bear Lake normally reaches 44° and falls to 33°. The record high is 62°, in 1964; the record low 12°, in 1933. The most rain on this date, 1.00 in, fell in 1916.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1898 at Frankfort 2 NE, 16 miles north-northwest, 110 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
