The Hawk Springs 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
Sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny; cooler
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
−21° on Nov. 13, 2014, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is −12° in 1986.
Hawk Springs’s center stands about 4,390 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 4,300 ft to 4,540 ft, a difference of 240 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bear Mountain, about 5,320 ft, 8 miles south.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lance Formation (sandstone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 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 19×. 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, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 66 to 100 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Claystone, sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, claystone. Age: Late Oligocene to Late Miocene, 5.3 to 28 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Claystone, sandstone. Age: Oligocene, 23 to 34 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 Hawk Springs reaches the Gulf of America by way of Horse Creek, the North Platte, the Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi: about 2,320 river miles.
1,170 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Hawk Springs; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Hawk Springs has a cold semi-arid climate. Summer afternoons average 88° in July; winter nights fall to about 14° in January. A normal year brings about 47 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 16 inches of water.
On November 14 Hawk Springs normally reaches 52° and falls to 21°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low −19°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.52 in, fell in 2008.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Harrisburg 12 WNW, 19 miles east-southeast, 160 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
