The Cucumber 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
11° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1989. Next is 12° in 2014.
Cucumber’s center stands about 1,670 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,500 ft to 2,460 ft, a difference of 960 ft: steep hill country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Chimney Rock, about 4,370 ft, 14 miles east-southeast.
The section below crosses 12 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.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, dolostone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 542 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale, siltstone, limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 0.8 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 0.5 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 6 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 Cucumber reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Jacobs Fork, the Dry Fork, the Tug Fork, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,790 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 Cucumber; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cucumber has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in January. A normal year brings about 18 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 45 inches of water.
On November 14 Cucumber normally reaches 58° and falls to 31°. The record high is 77°, in 1994; the record low 14°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.21 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1989 at Richlands, 16 miles southwest, 240 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
