The Randolph 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.
79° on Nov. 14, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1957. Next is 75° in 1971.
Randolph’s center stands about 1,660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,610 ft to 1,830 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pierre Shale, from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 57×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 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 Randolph reaches the Gulf of America by way of Middle Logan Creek, the Logan Creek Dredge, the Elkhorn, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 1,930 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 Randolph; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Randolph has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 9° in January. About 29 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Randolph normally reaches 48° and falls to 25°. The record high is 79°, in 2025; the record low −19°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.28 in, fell in 2008.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1957 at Concord, 19 miles east, 210 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.