The Paint Rock 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.
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Mostly sunny
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
3.59 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1897. The next wettest, 2.00 inches, fell in 1922.
Paint Rock’s center stands about 1,630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,590 ft to 1,740 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Terrace deposits (sand), from the Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 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 57×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Claystone. Age: Permian, 252 to 299 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene to Holocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 0.4 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 Paint Rock reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Concho and the Colorado: about 640 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Buchanan Lake, 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 Paint Rock; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Paint Rock has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 95° in July; winter nights fall to about 31° in January. About 23 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Paint Rock normally reaches 68° and falls to 42°. The record high is 87°, in 1989; the record low 17°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1958.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1897 at Ballinger 2 NW, 16 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
