The Fincastle 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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3.14 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1945. The next wettest, 3.08 inches, fell in 2024.
Fincastle’s center stands about 720 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 590 ft to 790 ft, a difference of 200 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Louisville Limestone and Waldron Shale, undivided, from the Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 43×. 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: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 384 to 422 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, 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 Fincastle reaches the Gulf of America by way of Hite Creek, Harrods Creek, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,360 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 Fincastle; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fincastle has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. A normal year brings about 13 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Fincastle normally reaches 58° and falls to 40°. The record high is 76°, in 2011; the record low 15°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.89 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Louisville Bowman Field, 9 miles southwest, 180 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
