The Beattyville 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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85° on Nov. 17, 1941, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1925. Next is 82° in 2020.
Beattyville’s center stands about 670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 650 ft to 1,130 ft, a difference of 480 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Rice Knob, about 1,450 ft, 14 miles south-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Breathitt Formation, lower part (shale, siltstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 28×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 21 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.5 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 Beattyville reaches the Gulf of America by way of Crystal Creek, the Kentucky, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,660 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Beattyville; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Beattyville has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 49 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Beattyville normally reaches 58° and falls to 32°. The record high is 80°, in 1931; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.90 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1925 at Quicksand, 20 miles east. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
