The Altamont 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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74° on Nov. 15, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1874. Next is 73° in 1928.
Altamont’s center stands about 460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 300 ft to 1,470 ft, a difference of 1,170 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Henry Hill, about 2,160 ft, 14 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Schenectady Formation (graywacke, sandstone, siltstone), from the Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 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 12×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Graywacke, sandstone, siltstone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Early Devonian to Middle Devonian, 388 to 410 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Middle Devonian, 384 to 394 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Early Devonian, 394 to 422 million years old. About 1 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 Altamont reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Bozen Kill, Normans Kill and the Hudson: about 170 river miles.
140 miles of the trip are on the Hudson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Altamont; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Altamont has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 16° in January. A normal year brings about 59 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Altamont normally reaches 50° and falls to 32°. The record high is 70°, in 1973; the record low 12°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 1.79 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1874 from the Albany Area threaded record (Albany International Airport, 12 miles east-northeast, 180 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
