The Walsh 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.
Walsh’s center stands about 3,960 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,870 ft to 4,010 ft, a difference of 140 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 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 34×. 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 20 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 0.8 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 Walsh reaches the Gulf of America by way of Sand Arroyo, Sand Arroyo Creek, the North Fork Cimarron, the Cimarron, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,660 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark 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 Walsh; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Walsh 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 Walsh 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, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
