The Plum Creek 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; warmer
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
3.93 inches of rain fell in two days, the most for this week of the year since records began in 1893. The next wettest, 3.66 inches, fell in 2009.
Plum Creek’s center stands about 1,860 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,710 ft to 2,260 ft, a difference of 550 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is High Knoll Mountain, about 3,260 ft, 12 miles southwest.
The section below crosses 17 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 16×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Biotite-gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartzite, conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 11 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 Plum Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Plum Creek, the New River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,920 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 Plum Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Plum Creek has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 22° in January. A normal year brings about 25 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
On November 14 Plum Creek normally reaches 55° and falls to 31°. The record high is 73°, in 1958; the record low 9°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.40 in, fell in 1972.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 from the Blacksburg Area threaded record (Blacksburg Nwso, 7 miles northeast, 240 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
