The Bladen 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
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
83° on Nov. 14, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 81° in 1999.
Bladen’s center stands about 1,990 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,930 ft to 2,020 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Niobrara Formation (limestone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 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 Bladen reaches the Gulf of America by way of Flat Creek, the Little Blue, the Big Blue, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,930 river miles.
Lake on the way: Tuttle Creek Lake.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bladen; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bladen has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. About 26 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bladen normally reaches 52° and falls to 29°. The record high is 83°, in 2025; the record low −7°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.20 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 from the Hastings Area threaded record (Hastings Municipal Airport, 21 miles north-northeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
