The Bunker Hill 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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Showers likely
82° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 81° in 1999.
Bunker Hill’s center stands about 1,850 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,660 ft to 1,870 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Loess (silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 51×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 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 Bunker Hill reaches the Gulf of America by way of Wilson Lake, the Saline, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,960 river miles.
Lake on the way: Wilson Lake.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bunker Hill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bunker Hill has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. About 25 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bunker Hill normally reaches 56° and falls to 30°. The record high is 80°, in 2025; the record low 3°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Russell Municipal Airport, 6 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
