The Rawlins 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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−24° on Nov. 13, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is −15° in 1951.
Rawlins’s center stands about 6,800 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,640 ft to 7,560 ft, a difference of 920 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Separation Peak, about 8,450 ft, 13 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Miocene Rocks (sandstone), from the Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. 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 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 78 to 82 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. 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. 4 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 Rawlins reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sugar Creek, the North Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,630 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 Rawlins; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rawlins has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. About 9 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Rawlins normally reaches 42° and falls to 21°. The record high is 70°, in 1999; the record low −7°, in 2000. The most rain on this date, 0.17 in, fell in 1988.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Rawlins Airport, 2 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
