The Blue Ridge 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.
Sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
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86° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1872. Next is 85° in 1896.
Blue Ridge’s center stands about 430 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 130 ft to 550 ft, a difference of 420 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Knob, about 580 ft, 3 miles north.
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 41×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mica-schist. Age: Precambrian to Paleozoic. About 0.4 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 Blue Ridge reaches Mobile Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Harwell Mill Creek, the Tallapoosa, the Alabama and the Mobile: about 370 river miles.
310 miles of the trip are on the Alabama.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Blue Ridge; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blue Ridge has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 36° in January. About 51 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Blue Ridge normally reaches 70° and falls to 43°. The record high is 85°, in 1993; the record low 26°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 3.25 in, fell in 1921.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1872 from the Montgomery Area threaded record (Montgomery Airport, 18 miles southwest, 210 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
