The Elk Mountain 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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Mostly sunny; cooler
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Showers likely
68° on Nov. 15, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1881. Next is 67° in 1953.
Elk Mountain’s center stands about 7,270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 7,120 ft to 7,580 ft, a difference of 460 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Elk Mountain, about 11,130 ft, 7 miles west-southwest.
The section below crosses 12 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 6×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Archean. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Archean. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 6 smaller units 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 Elk Mountain reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Medicine Bow, the North Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,720 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Seminoe Reservoir and Pathfinder Reservoir.
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 Elk Mountain; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Elk Mountain has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 10° in January. A normal year brings about 52 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 11 inches of water.
On November 14 Elk Mountain normally reaches 43° and falls to 18°. The record high is 67°, in 1953; the record low −6°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.25 in, fell in 2005.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1881 at Medicine Bow, 18 miles northeast, 710 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
