The Lake Cherokee 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.
19° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1902. Next is 20° in 1916.
Lake Cherokee’s center stands about 360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 270 ft to 410 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Holland Mountain, about 530 ft, 11 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Carizzo Sand (sandstone), from the Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old.
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 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.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Siltstone, sandstone. Age: Middle Eocene, 38 to 48 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Mudstone. Age: Late Paleocene to Early Eocene, 48 to 59 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.7 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 Lake Cherokee reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lake Cherokee and the Sabine: about 320 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Toledo Bend Reservoir, Sabine Lake and Lake Cherokee.
140 miles of the trip are on the Sabine.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lake Cherokee; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lake Cherokee has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in August; winter nights fall to about 37° in January. About 45 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lake Cherokee normally reaches 68° and falls to 45°. The record high is 89°, in 1955; the record low 22°, in 1907. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1902 from the Longview Area threaded record (Longview E Tx Regional Airport, 4 miles west-northwest). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.