The Blue 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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17° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1939. Next is 18° in 1969.
Blue Mountain’s center stands about 510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 380 ft to 2,090 ft, a difference of 1,710 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Signal Hill, about 2,760 ft, 5 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Atoka Formation - Upper part (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. 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: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 Blue Mountain reaches the Gulf of America by way of Ashley Creek, the Petit Jean, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 880 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Blue Mountain Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Blue Mountain; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blue Mountain has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Blue Mountain normally reaches 63° and falls to 38°. The record high is 83°, in 2007; the record low 20°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.41 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1939 at Blue Mountain Dam, 4 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
