The The Highlands 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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3° on Nov. 12, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1975. Next is 8° in 2018.
The Highlands’s center stands about 1,700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,540 ft to 1,720 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Dune Sand, 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 64×. 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 11 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.9 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 The Highlands reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little Arkansas, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,400 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of The Highlands; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
The Highlands has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 33 inches of water.
On November 14 The Highlands normally reaches 59° and falls to 32°. The record high is 76°, in 2025; the record low 8°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 1993.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1975 at Hutchinson, 6 miles south-southeast, 160 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
