The Natural Steps 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 1875. Next is 20° in 1940.
Natural Steps’s center stands about 290 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 240 ft to 600 ft, a difference of 360 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Moss Mountain, about 1,130 ft, 11 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Jackfork Sandstone (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 30×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 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 Natural Steps reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lake Maumelle, the Maumelle, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 750 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Maumelle and Murray 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 Natural Steps; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Natural Steps has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 50 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 4 inches of snow.
On November 14 Natural Steps normally reaches 62° and falls to 40°. The record high is 83°, in 1999; the record low 22°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 3.57 in, fell in 1958.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1875 from the Little Rock Area threaded record (Little Rock Airport Adams Field, 16 miles southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
