The Bishop Hills 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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Mostly sunny; warmer
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85° on Nov. 16, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 85° in 2025.
Bishop Hills’s center stands about 3,530 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,340 ft to 3,710 ft, a difference of 370 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Goat Mountain, about 3,770 ft, 6 miles west.
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 34×. 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-mudstone. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 208 to 247 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Conglomerate-sandstone. Age: Middle Triassic to Late Triassic, 208 to 247 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sandstone-mudstone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
Clay, silt. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 Bishop Hills reaches the Gulf of America by way of West Amarillo Creek, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,580 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bishop Hills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bishop Hills has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 17 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 20 inches of water.
On November 14 Bishop Hills normally reaches 62° and falls to 34°. The record high is 85°, in 2025; the record low 5°, in 1916. The most rain on this date, 1.09 in, fell in 1924.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 from the Amarillo Area threaded record (Amarillo Airport, 14 miles east-southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
