The Fairmount 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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67° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1991. Next is 64° in 2009.
Fairmount’s center stands about 1,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 950 ft to 2,370 ft, a difference of 1,420 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Huckleberry Mountain, about 2,590 ft, 14 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Catskill Formation (sandstone, siltstone, shale), from the Late Devonian, 359 to 384 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 10×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Siltstone, shale. Age: Late Devonian, 359 to 384 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.5 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 Fairmount reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Kitchen Creek, Huntington Creek, Fishing Creek and the Susquehanna: about 190 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Aldred.
110 miles of the trip are on the Susquehanna.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fairmount; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fairmount has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 78° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 70 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 53 inches of water.
On November 14 Fairmount normally reaches 45° and falls to 29°. The record high is 58°, in 2010; the record low 12°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.57 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1991 at Laporte, 15 miles northwest, 670 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
