The Brighton 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.
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
−12° on Nov. 15, 1933, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1903. Next is −9° in 2019.
Brighton’s center stands about 1,700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,590 ft to 2,110 ft, a difference of 520 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Moose Mountain, about 3,860 ft, 15 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Metanorthosite and anorthositic gneiss (gneiss, metaanorthosite), from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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 13×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Gneiss, metaanorthosite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Charnockite, gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Charnockite, gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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 Brighton reaches the St. Lawrence River by way of the Osgood, the East Branch Saint Regis, the Saint Regis and the Saint Lawrence: about 85 river miles. The St. Lawrence carries it on to the Atlantic.
50 miles of the trip are on the Saint Regis.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Brighton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Brighton has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in July; winter nights fall to about 2° in January. About 37 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Brighton normally reaches 42° and falls to 23°. The record high is 66°, in 1909; the record low −4°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.71 in, fell in 1959.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1903 from the Saranac Lake Area threaded record (Saranac Lake Adirondack Regional Airport, 6 miles south-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
