The Fairfax 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.
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
88° on Nov. 11, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1922. Next is 86° in 2016.
Fairfax’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 780 ft to 1,010 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Phinney Hill, about 1,100 ft, 14 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Vanoss Group (shale, limestone, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 44×. 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, limestone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale.
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 Fairfax reaches the Gulf of America by way of Salt Creek, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,160 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fairfax; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fairfax has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 94° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 37 inches of water.
On November 14 Fairfax normally reaches 63° and falls to 36°. The record high is 81°, in 2025; the record low 13°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.85 in, fell in 1978.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1922 at Ralston, 5 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
