The Canyon 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.
Showers likely
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
85° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1923. Next is 84° in 1966.
Canyon’s center stands about 3,550 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,480 ft to 3,630 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Unnamed Pliocene deposits (gravel, clay, sand), from the Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 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 38×. 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: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 16 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gravel, clay, sand. Age: Pliocene, 2.6 to 5.3 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.4 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 Canyon reaches the Gulf of America by way of Palo Duro Creek, the Prairie Dog Town Fork Red, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 1,340 river miles.
1,040 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Canyon; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Canyon has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 93° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 8 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 18 inches of water.
On November 14 Canyon normally reaches 62° and falls to 33°. The record high is 82°, in 2025; the record low 9°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 1.00 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1923 at Canyon, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
