The Skyland Estates 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.
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78° on Nov. 11, 2006, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1995. Next is 75° in 1999.
Skyland Estates’s center stands about 1,640 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 450 ft to 1,960 ft, a difference of 1,510 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mount Marshall, about 3,360 ft, 12 miles south-southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Catoctin Formation - Metabasalt, from the Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 10×. 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 8 mi of the line.
Granulite. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Quartzite, conglomerate, sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Gneiss. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion 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.
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 Skyland Estates reaches Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Shenandoah and the Potomac: about 220 river miles.
180 miles of the trip are on the Potomac.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Skyland Estates; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Skyland Estates 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, 6 miles west-southwest, 710 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
