The Spade 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
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
86° on Nov. 16, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1966. Next is 85° in 1967.
Spade’s center stands about 3,520 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 3,460 ft to 3,570 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
The section below crosses 3 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.
Sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Late Miocene to Pliocene, 2.6 to 12 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sand. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 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 Spade reaches the Gulf of America by way of the North Fork Double Mountain Fork Brazos, the Double Mountain Fork Brazos and the Brazos: about 1,190 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Possum Kingdom Lake and Lake Granbury.
550 miles of the trip are on the Brazos.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Spade; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spade has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 7 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 18 inches of water.
On November 14 Spade normally reaches 64° and falls to 32°. The record high is 85°, in 2025; the record low 6°, in 1976. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 2004.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1966 at Littlefield, 7 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
