The Fletcher 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.
73° on Nov. 16, 1989, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1883. Next is 71° in 2002.
Fletcher’s center stands about 620 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 430 ft to 1,450 ft, a difference of 1,020 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is The Chin, about 4,350 ft, 11 miles south-southeast.
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 6×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Phyllite, quartzite. 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 4 mi of the line.
Muscovite-schist. Age: Neoproterozoic to Early Cambrian, 521 to 1,000 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Phyllite. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 0.3 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 Fletcher reaches the St. Lawrence River by way of Stones Brook, 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 Fletcher; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fletcher 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 Fletcher 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, 19 miles southwest, 290 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.