The Lost Creek 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.
82° on Nov. 17, 1958, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1922. Next is 79° in 1993.
Lost Creek’s center stands about 1,060 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,020 ft to 1,530 ft, a difference of 510 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is King Knob, about 1,970 ft, 13 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Conemaugh Group (shale, siltstone, sandstone), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 23×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, siltstone, sandstone. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 11 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Fine-detrital, coarse-detrital. Age: Quaternary, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Carboniferous to Permian, 252 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 Lost Creek reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lost Creek, the West Fork, the Monongahela, the Ohio and the Mississippi: about 2,130 river miles.
970 miles of the trip are on the Ohio.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lost Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lost Creek has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 86° in July; winter nights fall to about 24° in January. About 45 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Lost Creek normally reaches 56° and falls to 36°. The record high is 77°, in 1955; the record low 12°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 1.43 in, fell in 2007.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1922 from the Clarksburg Area threaded record (Clarksburg Benedum Airport, 12 miles northeast, 140 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.