The Elk Creek 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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13° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1995. Next is 17° in 1995.
Elk Creek’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 620 ft to 790 ft, a difference of 170 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Jeptha Knob, about 1,200 ft, 15 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ashlock Formation, Grant Lake and Calloway Creek Limestones, and Fairview Formation, undivided, from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 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 53×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, limestone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.3 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 Elk Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Elk Creek, the Salt River, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,380 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 Elk Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Elk Creek has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 26° in January. A normal year brings about 15 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 53 inches of water.
On November 14 Elk Creek normally reaches 57° and falls to 38°. The record high is 75°, in 2011; the record low 21°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.85 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1995 at Louisville Wfo, 15 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
