The Crawford 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 cloudy
Sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; cooler
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
−16° on Nov. 13, 1916, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is −16° in 2014.
Crawford’s center stands about 3,680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,600 ft to 4,240 ft, a difference of 640 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is First Woman Mound, about 4,670 ft, 10 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows White River Group (clay), from the Early Oligocene to Late Oligocene, 23 to 34 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 14×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay. Age: Early Oligocene to Late Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sand, volcanic. Age: Late Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 28 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 0.6 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 Crawford reaches the Gulf of America by way of the White River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,650 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark 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 Crawford; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Crawford has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 89° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 50 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 19 inches of water.
On November 14 Crawford normally reaches 51° and falls to 22°. The record high is 80°, in 1894; the record low −15°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.20 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Chadron 3 SW, 20 miles east-northeast, 330 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
