The Whispering Pines 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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4.93 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1952. The next wettest, 4.58 inches, fell in 2020.
Whispering Pines’s center stands about 380 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 290 ft to 470 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Gaddys Mountain, about 550 ft, 14 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Middendorf Formation (sand), from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 50×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Phyllite, schist. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Tertiary, 2.6 to 66 million years old. About 0.5 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 Whispering Pines reaches the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Little River and the Cape Fear: about 210 river miles.
160 miles of the trip are on the Cape Fear.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Whispering Pines; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Whispering Pines has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 48 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 3 inches of snow.
On November 14 Whispering Pines normally reaches 63° and falls to 42°. The record high is 82°, in 1964; the record low 20°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.47 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1952 at Jackson Springs 5 WNW, 18 miles west-southwest, 350 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
