The Garrison 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.
82° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 80° in 1902.
Garrison’s center stands about 530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 480 ft to 1,120 ft, a difference of 640 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Staffords Hill, about 1,240 ft, 12 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Alluvium (sand, silt), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 24×. 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, sandstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 0.4 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 Garrison reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,580 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 Garrison; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Garrison has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 43 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Garrison normally reaches 57° and falls to 34°. The record high is 79°, in 1955; the record low 10°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.36 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Portsmouth-Sciotoville, 19 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.