The White River 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.
81° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 80° in 1990.
White River’s center stands about 2,140 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,920 ft to 2,250 ft, a difference of 330 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Table Butte, about 2,650 ft, 13 miles south.
The section below crosses 6 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 26×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Coarse-detrital, clay. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale, bentonite. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Claystone, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Eocene to Oligocene, 23 to 56 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Silt, sand. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, siltstone. Age: Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 23 million years old. About 0.3 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 White River reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Little White, the White River, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,250 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 White River; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
White River 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 White River 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, 14 miles east-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.