The McCracken 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
Showers likely
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
85° on Nov. 12, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 84° in 1999.
McCracken’s center stands about 2,140 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,100 ft to 2,210 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Round House Rock, about 2,350 ft, 11 miles north-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt, clay), 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 50×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, chalk. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Arkose. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.4 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 McCracken reaches the Gulf of America by way of Big Timber Creek, the Smoky Hill, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,040 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 McCracken; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
McCracken has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 17° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 23 inches of water.
On November 14 McCracken normally reaches 56° and falls to 29°. The record high is 84°, in 1999; the record low 0°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.07 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 at Cedar Bluff Dam, 17 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
