The Minden 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
Showers likely
Chance of showers; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
17° on Nov. 13, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 22° in 1970.
Minden’s center stands about 250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 150 ft to 360 ft, a difference of 210 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Bull Hill, about 430 ft, 15 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows High Terraces (clay, silt, sand), from the Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 52×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Clay, marl. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Clay. Age: Holocene, less than 12,000 years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Clay, silt, sand. Age: Pleistocene, less than 2.6 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Sand, clay. Age: Eocene, 34 to 56 million years old. About 0.3 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 Minden reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mile Creek, the Bayou Dorcheat, Loggy Bayou, the Red River, the Atchafalaya and the Lower Atchafalaya: about 410 river miles.
Lake on the way: Tadpole Lake.
230 miles of the trip are on the Red River.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Minden; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Minden has a humid subtropical climate. Summer afternoons average 92° in July; winter nights fall to about 32° in January. About 57 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Minden normally reaches 66° and falls to 41°. The record high is 84°, in 1955; the record low 22°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 1.68 in, fell in 1970.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Homer 1 N, 19 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
