The Red Butte 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 sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; cooler
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely; cooler
−27° on Nov. 12, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1939. Next is −19° in 2000.
Red Butte’s center stands about 5,170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 5,130 ft to 5,950 ft, a difference of 820 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Muddy Mountain, about 8,290 ft, 12 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium and Colluvium (clay, silt, sand), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 11 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.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 78 to 83 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Permian to Early Triassic, 247 to 299 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metasedimentary. Age: Archean. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 to 324 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Early Triassic to Late Triassic, 202 to 252 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. 5 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 Red Butte reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,500 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 Red Butte; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Red Butte has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 72 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 12 inches of water.
On November 14 Red Butte normally reaches 47° and falls to 23°. The record high is 68°, in 1999; the record low −10°, in 1978. The most rain on this date, 0.40 in, fell in 2006.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1939 from the Casper Area threaded record (Casper-Natrona County Airport, 7 miles north-northwest, 150 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
