The Rich 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
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
78° on Nov. 14, 1993, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1951. Next is 75° in 1985.
Rich Creek’s center stands about 1,700 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,480 ft to 3,220 ft, a difference of 1,740 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Butt Mountain, about 4,220 ft, 11 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pennington Group (shale, sandstone, mudstone), from the Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old.
The section below crosses 13 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 8×. 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: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone, shale. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 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. 7 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 Rich Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Rich Creek, the New River, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,880 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 Rich Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Rich Creek has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 23 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Rich Creek normally reaches 56° and falls to 31°. The record high is 78°, in 1993; the record low 8°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.63 in, fell in 2008.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1951 at Pearisburg 4 SSE, 10 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
