The Bluff Dale 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.
89° on Nov. 17, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1918. Next is 87° in 1921.
Bluff Dale’s center stands about 920 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 850 ft to 1,130 ft, a difference of 280 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Lone Mountain, about 1,400 ft, 13 miles south.
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 35×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Claystone, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Limestone, marlstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone, shale. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 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 Bluff Dale reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Paluxy and the Brazos: about 550 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bluff Dale; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bluff Dale has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 98° in August; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 34 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Bluff Dale normally reaches 69° and falls to 42°. The record high is 87°, in 1989; the record low 20°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 1.43 in, fell in 1923.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1918 at Stephenville 9 NNE, 6 miles west, 240 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.