The Cheyenne 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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89° on Nov. 17, 2017, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1904. Next is 85° in 1988.
Cheyenne’s center stands about 1,950 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,900 ft to 2,150 ft, a difference of 250 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (fine-detrital), from the Holocene, less than 12,000 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 28×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 3 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 Cheyenne reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sergeant Major Creek, the Washita, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 1,330 river miles.
Lake on the way: Foss Reservoir.
680 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cheyenne; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cheyenne has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 9 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Cheyenne normally reaches 62° and falls to 37°. The record high is 85°, in 1988; the record low 12°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.49 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1904 at Elk City 4 W, 18 miles south-southeast, 170 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
