The Horse Creek 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
81° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 80° in 1990.
Horse Creek’s center stands about 2,010 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,980 ft to 2,330 ft, a difference of 350 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Table Butte, about 2,650 ft, 11 miles south.
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 25×. 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, bentonite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Claystone, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 56 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Oligocene to Miocene, 5.3 to 34 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, siltstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 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. 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 Horse Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little White, the White River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,260 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Francis Case and Lewis and Clark Lake.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Horse Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Horse Creek has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 11° in January. A normal year brings about 50 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Horse Creek normally reaches 49° and falls to 24°. The record high is 79°, in 2025; the record low −18°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.48 in, fell in 1927.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1913 at Wood, 13 miles east, 170 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
