The Vails Gate 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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76° on Nov. 16, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1931. Next is 73° in 1964.
Vails Gate’s center stands about 280 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 20 ft to 610 ft, a difference of 590 ft: hilly country. Open water lies within three miles. The highest named summit within 15 miles is South Beacon Mountain, about 1,580 ft, 6 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Normanskill Formation (shale), from the Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 13×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Granite, gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Unconsolidated. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Early Cambrian, 521 to 542 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. 1 smaller unit 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 Vails Gate reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Silver Stream, Moodna Creek and the Hudson: about 65 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Vails Gate; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Vails Gate has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 18° in January. About 42 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Vails Gate normally reaches 52° and falls to 32°. The record high is 72°, in 1973; the record low 13°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 2.01 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1931 from the Poughkeepsie Area threaded record (Poughkeepsie/Hudson Valley Regional Airport, 15 miles northeast, 130 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
