The Bigfoot 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 cloudy; cooler
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
98° on Nov. 16, 1986, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1941. Next is 98° in 2010.
Bigfoot’s center stands about 650 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 580 ft to 710 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Queen City Sand (siltstone, sandstone), from the Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gravel. Age: Late Pliocene to Pleistocene, less than 3.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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.
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 Bigfoot reaches Corpus Christi Bay and the Gulf of America by way of Smith Branch, Siestedero Creek, the Atascosa, the Frio and the Nueces: about 200 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Corpus Christi.
85 miles of the trip are on the Atascosa.
Often dry. About 30% of the way is mapped as streams that run only after rain or snowmelt; the water makes the whole trip in floods.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bigfoot; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bigfoot has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in August; winter nights fall to about 41° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bigfoot normally reaches 75° and falls to 50°. The record high is 91°, in 1983; the record low 30°, in 1975. The most rain on this date, 1.00 in, fell in 1959.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1941 at Poteet, 18 miles east, 220 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
