The Gurdon 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
15° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 17° in 1959.
Gurdon’s center stands about 220 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 180 ft to 300 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bull Mountain, about 420 ft, 6 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Midway Group (clay, marl), from the Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, fine-detrital. Age: Early Eocene, 48 to 56 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Clay, marl. Age: Paleocene, 56 to 66 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Marlstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 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 Gurdon reaches the Gulf of America by way of Coffee Creek, Caney Creek, Terre Noire Creek, the Little Missouri, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 550 river miles.
310 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Gurdon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gurdon has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 30° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Gurdon normally reaches 64° and falls to 40°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 15°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.46 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 at Prescott 2 NNW, 15 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
