The Hill City 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.
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
85° on Nov. 16, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1907. Next is 84° in 2025.
Hill City’s center stands about 2,190 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,090 ft to 2,330 ft, a difference of 240 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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 45×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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.
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 Hill City reaches the Gulf of America by way of the South Fork Solomon, the Solomon, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,070 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 Hill City; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hill City has a dry-winter hot-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. About 22 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Hill City normally reaches 56° and falls to 28°. The record high is 84°, in 2025; the record low −10°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.55 in, fell in 1968.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1907 at Hill City Municipal Airport, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
