The Gaylord 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
81° on Nov. 11, 2012, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1910. Next is 81° in 2016.
Gaylord’s center stands about 1,600 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,570 ft to 1,740 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is North Hill, about 1,780 ft, 14 miles southeast.
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 60×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 Gaylord reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Creek, the North Fork Solomon, the Solomon, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,980 river miles.
Lake on the way: Waconda 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 Gaylord; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Gaylord has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Gaylord normally reaches 54° and falls to 28°. The record high is 77°, in 1990; the record low −3°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 0.60 in, fell in 1947.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1910 at Smith Center, 10 miles north-northeast, 220 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
