The Darden 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.
Sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Sunny
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1962. Next is 19° in 1982.
Darden’s center stands about 480 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 370 ft to 530 ft, a difference of 160 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Spout Spring Hill, about 690 ft, 11 miles east-southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Coffee Sand, from the Cretaceous, 66 to 145 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 53×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 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.
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 Darden reaches the Gulf of America by way of Darden Branch, the Beech, the Tennessee, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,170 river miles.
Lake on the way: Pickwick Lake.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Darden; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Darden has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 90° in July; winter nights fall to about 27° in January. About 55 inches of rain fall in a normal year, with about 2 inches of snow.
On November 14 Darden normally reaches 61° and falls to 37°. The record high is 79°, in 1978; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.70 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Lexington, 10 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
