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.
77° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 73° in 1990.
Bear Lake’s center stands about 1,560 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,430 ft to 1,840 ft, a difference of 410 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Jackson Hill, about 1,980 ft, 10 miles south.
The section below crosses 7 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.
Siltstone, conglomerate. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 the Gulf of America by way of Little Brokenstraw Creek, Brokenstraw Creek, the Allegheny, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 2,150 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Ohio.
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 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 98 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 46 inches of water.
On November 14 Bear Lake normally reaches 49° and falls to 31°. The record high is 71°, in 2010; the record low 7°, in 1905. The most rain on this date, 0.88 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 from the Jamestown Area threaded record (Jamestown 4 ENE, 19 miles east-northeast, 310 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.