The Bolt 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
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
79° on Nov. 16, 1918, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 79° in 1958.
Bolt’s center stands about 2,050 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,860 ft to 3,120 ft, a difference of 1,260 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ivy Knob, about 3,540 ft, 4 miles west-northwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows New River Formation (sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 11×. 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 13 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 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.
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 Bolt reaches the Gulf of America by way of Breckenridge Creek, the Marsh Fork, the Big Coal, the Coal, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,810 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 Bolt; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bolt has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about 19° in January. A normal year brings about 38 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 43 inches of water.
On November 14 Bolt normally reaches 54° and falls to 29°. The record high is 77°, in 1993; the record low 7°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1915.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Beckley Va Hospital, 12 miles east, 280 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
