The Bland 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
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Partly cloudy; warmer
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6° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 8° in 1986.
Bland’s center stands about 2,460 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,390 ft to 3,770 ft, a difference of 1,380 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ghost Knob, about 4,090 ft, 15 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Nolichucky and Honaker Formations (shale, dolostone), from the Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old.
The section below crosses 12 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 10×. 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, sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, shale. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 6 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 Bland reaches the Gulf of America by way of Crab Orchard Creek, Walker Creek, the New River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,950 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bland; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bland has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 35 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Bland normally reaches 53° and falls to 35°. The record high is 81°, in 1993; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.97 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 from the Bluefield Area threaded record (Bluefield Mercer County Airport, 15 miles north-northwest, 400 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
