The Sugar Mountain 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.
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Sunny; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
5.03 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1991. The next wettest, 3.22 inches, fell in 2009.
Sugar Mountain’s center stands about 4,570 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,480 ft to 5,300 ft, a difference of 1,820 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Roan High Knob, about 6,280 ft, 14 miles west.
The section below crosses 8 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 5×. 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: Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic, 950 to 1,250 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Metagraywacke. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Age: Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic, 965 to 1,003 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Metadiabase, greenstone. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metasandstone. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic to Neoproterozoic, 1 to 1 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 2 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 Sugar Mountain reaches the Gulf of America by way of Bee Branch, the Elk River, the Watauga, the South Fork Holston, the Holston, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,880 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Guntersville Lake, White Lake (historical), Pickwick Lake and Cummings Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Sugar Mountain; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sugar Mountain has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 69° in July; winter nights fall to about 20° in January. A normal year brings about 66 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 58 inches of water.
On November 14 Sugar Mountain normally reaches 46° and falls to 31°. The record high is 77°, in 2003; the record low 9°, in 2013. The most rain on this date, 0.91 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1991 at Beech Mountain, 4 miles north, 490 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
