The Flat Lick 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
13° on Nov. 11, 1957, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1936. Next is 13° in 2019.
Flat Lick’s center stands about 1,090 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 980 ft to 1,970 ft, a difference of 990 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Canada Peak, about 2,940 ft, 13 miles south.
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 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 15×. 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 19 mi of the line.
Sand, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Conglomerate. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 299 to 422 million years old. About 0.4 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 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 Flat Lick reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lick Branch, Stinking Creek, the Cumberland, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,670 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Bards Lake, Lake Cumberland and Cordell Hull Reservoir.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Flat Lick; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Flat Lick has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. About 54 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Flat Lick normally reaches 59° and falls to 33°. The record high is 76°, in 1994; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.82 in, fell in 1937.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1936 at Barbourville, 7 miles west-northwest, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
