The Moorcroft 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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76° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1903. Next is 75° in 1912.
Moorcroft’s center stands about 4,260 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,130 ft to 4,480 ft, a difference of 350 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Goose Butte, about 4,810 ft, 14 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lance Formation (sandstone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 31×. 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, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 78 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. 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.
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 Moorcroft reaches the Gulf of America by way of Rush Creek, the Belle Fourche, the Cheyenne, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,750 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Oahe, Lake Sharpe, Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark Lake.
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 Moorcroft; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Moorcroft has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Moorcroft normally reaches 44° and falls to 23°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low −10°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.34 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1903 at Moorcroft, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
