The Guide Rock 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
82° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1894. Next is 81° in 2016.
Guide Rock’s center stands about 1,660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,620 ft to 1,780 ft, a difference of 160 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 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 58×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 0.7 mi of the line.
Sand, silt, clay. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.4 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 Guide Rock reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,880 river miles.
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 Guide Rock; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Guide Rock has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 26 inches of water.
On November 14 Guide Rock normally reaches 53° and falls to 25°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low −3°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.14 in, fell in 1926.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1894 at Red Cloud, 10 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
