The Skellytown 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.
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86° on Nov. 16, 2021, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1949. Next is 85° in 1966.
Skellytown’s center stands about 3,230 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,050 ft to 3,320 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ogallala Formation (sand), from the Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 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.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Coarse-detrital, fine-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 0.6 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 Skellytown reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spring Creek, the Canadian, the Arkansas and the Mississippi: about 1,520 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Murray Lake and Ozark Lake.
600 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Skellytown; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Skellytown has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 96° in July; winter nights fall to about 28° in January. About 19 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Skellytown normally reaches 63° and falls to 37°. The record high is 85°, in 2025; the record low 8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.88 in, fell in 2001.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1949 from the Borger Area threaded record (Borger Hutchinson County Airport, 14 miles northwest, 190 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
