The Pleasant Valley 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.
74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 73° in 1993.
Pleasant Valley’s center stands about 560 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 390 ft to 1,130 ft, a difference of 740 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bald Mountain, about 1,780 ft, 14 miles northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Hoosac Schist (schist, gneiss), from the Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old.
The section below crosses 12 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Arkose. Age: Late Triassic to Early Jurassic, 175 to 237 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Schist, gneiss. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, granofels. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Schist, granofels. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million 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. 6 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Pleasant Valley reaches Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the West Branch Farmington, the Farmington and the Connecticut: about 110 river miles.
55 miles of the trip are on the Connecticut.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Pleasant Valley; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pleasant Valley has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 59 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 54 inches of water.
On November 14 Pleasant Valley normally reaches 50° and falls to 29°. The record high is 64°, in 2010; the record low 11°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.93 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Bakersville, 5 miles south, 130 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.