The Wellfleet 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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84° on Nov. 14, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 83° in 1999.
Wellfleet’s center stands about 2,820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,740 ft to 3,010 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ogallala Group or Formation (siltstone-mudstone, conglomerate-sandstone), from the Miocene, 5.3 to 23 million years old.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 40×. 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 24 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 Wellfleet reaches the Gulf of America by way of Medicine Creek, the Republican, the Kansas, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,090 river miles.
Lake on the way: Harlan County 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 Wellfleet; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Wellfleet has a dry-winter hot-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 91° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 28 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 21 inches of water.
On November 14 Wellfleet normally reaches 56° and falls to 24°. The record high is 84°, in 2025; the record low −10°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.30 in, fell in 1985.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Curtis, 14 miles southeast, 210 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
