The Blue Ridge Shores 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 sunny
Partly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
5.98 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1916. The next wettest, 4.01 inches, fell in 1926.
Blue Ridge Shores’s center stands about 360 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 260 ft to 500 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Peters Mountain, about 1,800 ft, 14 miles west.
The section below crosses 9 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 28×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granodiorite. Age: Ordovician to Silurian, 422 to 487 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Metagraywacke, mica-schist. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metabasalt. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metavolcanic. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Melange. Age: Neoproterozoic to Ordovician, 445 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Slate, schist. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 3 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 Blue Ridge Shores reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of Hickory Creek, the North Anna, the Pamunkey and the York: about 180 river miles.
90 miles of the trip are on the Pamunkey.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Blue Ridge Shores; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blue Ridge Shores has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 25° in January. A normal year brings about 16 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 44 inches of water.
On November 14 Blue Ridge Shores normally reaches 58° and falls to 34°. The record high is 80°, in 1985; the record low 8°, in 1920. The most rain on this date, 1.67 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1916 at Louisa, 5 miles south. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
