The Burns 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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75° on Nov. 15, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1871. Next is 75° in 2016.
Burns’s center stands about 5,520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,370 ft to 5,580 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Gravel, pediment, and fan deposits, from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 25×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, claystone, conglomerate. Age: Late Miocene, 5.3 to 12 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Claystone, conglomerate. Age: Late Eocene to Early Oligocene, 31 to 35 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, claystone. Age: Late Oligocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 28 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
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 Burns reaches the Gulf of America by way of North Fork Muddy Creek, Muddy Creek, Lodgepole Creek, the South Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,370 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Burns; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Burns has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 63 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 15 inches of water.
On November 14 Burns normally reaches 48° and falls to 25°. The record high is 71°, in 2025; the record low −7°, in 1872. The most rain on this date, 0.25 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1871 from the Cheyenne Area threaded record (Cheyenne Wsfo Airport, 23 miles west, 600 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
