The Lake of the Woods 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 sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Mostly sunny
Showers likely
Sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
73° on Nov. 11, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1984. Next is 73° in 2016.
Lake of the Woods’s center stands about 6,740 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 6,430 ft to 7,050 ft, a difference of 620 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Wishbone Mountain, about 8,830 ft, 15 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Cretaceous sedimentary rocks (sandstone, shale), from the Late Cretaceous, 88 to 97 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.
Basalt. Age: Early Pliocene to Holocene, less than 4 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, limestone. Age: Permian, 270 to 280 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Sandstone, shale. Age: Late Cretaceous, 88 to 97 million years old. About 4 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 Lake of the Woods reaches the Gulf of California by way of Walnut Creek, Show Low Creek, Silver Creek, the Little Colorado and the Colorado: about 1,020 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Mead, Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu.
290 miles of the trip are on the Colorado.
Seldom reaches the sea. Dams and canals now take nearly all of the Colorado before its old delta in Mexico.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Lake of the Woods; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lake of the Woods has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 23° in December. A normal year brings about 19 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 16 inches of water.
On November 14 Lake of the Woods normally reaches 57° and falls to 32°. The record high is 70°, in 2025; the record low 11°, in 1985. The most rain on this date, 0.29 in, fell in 2009.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1984 at Show Low Airport, 7 miles north, 330 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
