The Garretts Mill 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
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
81° on Nov. 15, 1973, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1891. Next is 80° in 1931.
Garretts Mill’s center stands about 480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 230 ft to 1,420 ft, a difference of 1,190 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lambs Knoll, about 1,760 ft, 7 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granodiorite and Biotite Granite Gneiss, from the Precambrian.
The section below crosses 9 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.
Gneiss. Age: Precambrian. About 7 mi of the line.
Hornblende-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Shale, phyllite. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Metabasalt. Age: Proterozoic to Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 2.5 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Metagranite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Phyllite, metasandstone, metaconglomerate. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 3 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Garretts Mill reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Israel Creek and the Potomac: about 180 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Garretts Mill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Garretts Mill has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. About 39 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Garretts Mill normally reaches 56° and falls to 35°. The record high is 77°, in 1989; the record low 13°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.41 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1891 from the Martinsburg Area threaded record (Martinsburg Eastern West Virginia Regional Airport, 16 miles west-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
