The Granite Shoals 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.
24° on Nov. 14, 2018, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1996. Next is 24° in 2019.
Granite Shoals’s center stands about 880 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 820 ft to 940 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Dancer Peak, about 1,710 ft, 14 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Town Mountain Granite, from the Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old.
The section below crosses 10 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 25×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Proterozoic, 542 to 2,500 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Cambrian to Early Ordovician, 471 to 497 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone, marlstone. Age: Early Cretaceous, 100 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 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. 4 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Granite Shoals reaches the Gulf of America by way of Elm Creek and the Colorado: about 390 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Marble Falls and Lake Lyndon B Johnson.
320 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Granite Shoals; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Granite Shoals has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in August; winter nights fall to about 38° in January. About 28 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Granite Shoals normally reaches 69° and falls to 48°. The record high is 86°, in 2007; the record low 24°, in 2018. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1996 at Burnet Municipal Airport, 14 miles northeast, 390 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.