The Luray 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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83° on Nov. 17, 2016, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1964. Next is 80° in 2021.
Luray’s center stands about 1,590 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,530 ft to 1,730 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Sand Mound, about 2,030 ft, 10 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dakota Formation (claystone, mudstone, shale), from the Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 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 36×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone, mudstone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, 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 Luray reaches the Gulf of America by way of Coon Creek, Wolf Creek, the Saline, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,960 river miles.
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 Luray; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Luray has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 10 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Luray normally reaches 57° and falls to 31°. The record high is 78°, in 2025; the record low 4°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.15 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1964 at Wilson Lake, 15 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
