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.
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74° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1948. Next is 74° in 2022.
Lake of the Woods’s center stands about 810 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 790 ft to 850 ft, a difference of 60 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ellsworth Shale, from the Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 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 64×. 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. Age: Devonian to Carboniferous, 324 to 422 million years old. About 20 mi of the line.
Black-shale. Age: Devonian, 359 to 422 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 America by way of the Yellow, the Kankakee, the Illinois and the Mississippi: about 1,620 river miles.
Lake on the way: Peoria Lake.
1,190 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
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 warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 15° in January. A normal year brings about 37 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 42 inches of water.
On November 14 Lake of the Woods normally reaches 48° and falls to 30°. The record high is 72°, in 1989; the record low 8°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 0.40 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1948 at Lakeville, 8 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
