The Mountain Pine 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
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
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Mostly sunny
15° on Nov. 12, 1991, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1950. Next is 16° in 2019.
Mountain Pine’s center stands about 470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 410 ft to 1,070 ft, a difference of 660 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ouachita Pinnacle, about 1,960 ft, 12 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pole Creek Shale (Upper Ordovician) and Bigfork Chert (Upper and Middle Ordovician) (chert, shale), from the Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 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 15×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Black-shale, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Chert, shale. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.5 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 Mountain Pine reaches the Gulf of America by way of Glazypeau Creek, the Ouachita, the Black River, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 630 river miles.
420 miles of the trip are on the Ouachita.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Mountain Pine; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mountain Pine has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 29° in January. About 58 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 1 inch of snow.
On November 14 Mountain Pine normally reaches 62° and falls to 39°. The record high is 81°, in 1999; the record low 16°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.70 in, fell in 1958.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1950 at Blakely Mountain Dam, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
