The Essex 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.
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy; warmer
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Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
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73° on Nov. 16, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1883. Next is 71° in 2002.
Essex’s center stands about 680 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 450 ft to 990 ft, a difference of 540 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is The Chin, about 4,350 ft, 12 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Pinnacle Formation - undivided (quartz-feldspar-schist, phyllite, metagraywacke), from the Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 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 5×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Quartz-feldspar-schist, phyllite, metagraywacke. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Muscovite-schist, phyllite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Phyllite, quartzite. Age: Neoproterozoic to Cambrian, 487 to 1,000 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Cambrian, 521 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Early Cambrian, 521 to 542 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 2 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 Essex reaches the St. Lawrence River by way of the Browns, the Lamoille and the Richelieu: about 150 river miles. The St. Lawrence carries it on to the Atlantic.
Lake on the way: Lake Champlain.
80 miles of the trip are on the Richelieu.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Essex; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Essex has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 13° in January. A normal year brings about 88 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 38 inches of water.
On November 14 Essex normally reaches 47° and falls to 33°. The record high is 67°, in 1959; the record low 10°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 1.14 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1883 from the Burlington Area threaded record (Burlington International Airport, 7 miles southwest, 350 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
