The Lester 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
Sunny; 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.
Lester’s center stands about 2,040 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,950 ft to 2,640 ft, a difference of 690 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Huff Knob, about 3,560 ft, 14 miles southeast.
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 2 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 23 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million 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 Lester reaches the Gulf of America by way of Surveyor Creek, the Marsh Fork, the Big Coal, the Coal, the Kanawha, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 1,820 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 Lester; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lester 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 Lester 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, 6 miles east-northeast, 290 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
