The Vilas 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.
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
0° on Nov. 17, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 4° in 2019.
Vilas’s center stands about 4,160 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,060 ft to 4,250 ft, a difference of 190 ft: gently rolling country.
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.
The section below crosses 2 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, conglomerate. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 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 Vilas reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bear Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,730 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 Vilas; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Vilas 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 Vilas 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, 8 miles east, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
