The El Rancho 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; cooler
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
74° on Nov. 17, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1962. Next is 74° in 2025.
El Rancho’s center stands about 4,880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,720 ft to 5,080 ft, a difference of 360 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Albany Peak, about 7,650 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lower Miocene and Upper Oligocene rocks or rocks equivalent to Upper and Lower Miocene rocks and White River Formation (sandstone, siltstone, claystone), from the Late Oligocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 28 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 10×. 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 7 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, claystone. Age: Late Oligocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 28 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Amphibolite, hornblende-gneiss, biotite-gneiss. Age: Archean. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Archean. About 2 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 El Rancho reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Creek, Cottonwood Creek, the North 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 El Rancho; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
El Rancho has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in December. About 16 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Guernsey Dam No 2, 15 miles east, 520 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
