The Valley Falls 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.
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
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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.
Valley Falls’s center stands about 370 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 180 ft to 710 ft, a difference of 530 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Dickinson Hill, about 1,780 ft, 11 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Undifferentiated Middle Ordovician thru Lower Cambrian allochthonous rocks (mudstone), from the Cambrian to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 542 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 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.
Mudstone. Age: Cambrian to Middle Ordovician, 459 to 542 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Graywacke. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Graywacke, shale. Age: Middle Ordovician, 459 to 471 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Slate, shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 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. 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 Valley Falls reaches New York Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Hoosic and the Hudson: about 180 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Valley Falls; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Valley Falls 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 Valley Falls 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, 16 miles southwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
