The Hackettstown 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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75° on Nov. 16, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 74° in 1902.
Hackettstown’s center stands about 550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 500 ft to 1,200 ft, a difference of 700 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Scotts Mountain, about 1,290 ft, 14 miles west-southwest.
The section below crosses 16 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 20×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1.1 to 1.1 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 497 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Slate, shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Graywacke, siltstone. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 10 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Hackettstown reaches Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Musconetcong and the Delaware: about 180 river miles.
140 miles of the trip are on the Delaware.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hackettstown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hackettstown has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 48 inches of water.
On November 14 Hackettstown normally reaches 53° and falls to 30°. The record high is 72°, in 1964; the record low 11°, in 1905. The most rain on this date, 0.90 in, fell in 1940.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Belvidere Area threaded record (Belvidere Bridge, 14 miles west, 290 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
