The Chester Gap 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
78° on Nov. 11, 2006, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1995. Next is 75° in 1999.
Chester Gap’s center stands about 1,470 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 690 ft to 2,510 ft, a difference of 1,820 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hogback Mountain, about 3,470 ft, 10 miles southwest.
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 9×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Metabasalt. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Granulite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Phyllite, metasandstone, metaconglomerate. Age: Neoproterozoic, 542 to 1,000 million years old. About 0.3 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 Chester Gap reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Rappahannock: about 190 river miles.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Chester Gap; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Chester Gap has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 87° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. A normal year brings about 21 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1995 at Front Royal, 5 miles northwest, 540 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
