The Two Buttes 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.
0° on Nov. 17, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 4° in 2019.
Two Buttes’s center stands about 4,100 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,030 ft to 4,170 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Two Buttes, about 4,640 ft, 11 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ogallala Fm (sandstone, conglomerate), from the Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 33×. 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, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 24 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 Two Buttes reaches the Gulf of America by way of Little Horse Creek, Horse Creek, Bear Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,720 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
730 miles of the trip are on the Arkansas.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Two Buttes; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Two Buttes has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Two Buttes normally reaches 57° and falls to 29°. The record high is 80°, in 2007; the record low 6°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Walsh 1 W, 13 miles south-southeast, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.