The Pocahontas 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
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
6° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 8° in 1986.
Pocahontas’s center stands about 2,370 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 2,250 ft to 2,880 ft, a difference of 630 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Hutchinson Rock, about 4,520 ft, 14 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pocahontas Formation (sandstone, siltstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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 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.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone, limestone. Age: Cambrian to Ordovician, 445 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 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. 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 Pocahontas reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Laurel Fork, the Bluestone, the New River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,910 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 Pocahontas; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Pocahontas 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 Pocahontas 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, 7 miles east, 480 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
