The Portage Lake 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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67° on Nov. 11, 2020, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1939. Next is 66° in 2002.
Portage Lake’s center stands about 760 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 600 ft to 1,040 ft, a difference of 440 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Pennington Mountain, about 1,750 ft, 13 miles north.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Ordovician Winterville Formation (basalt), from the Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old.
The section below crosses 7 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 21×. 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: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Sandstone, mudstone. Age: Silurian to Devonian, 359 to 445 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Early Devonian, 410 to 414 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone, conglomerate. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Ordovician, 445 to 487 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Mudstone, sandstone. Age: Silurian, 422 to 445 million years old. About 0.6 mi of the line.
From the USGS State Geologic Map Compilation (Horton and others, 2017), the states’ geologic maps joined at a common scale. 1 smaller unit along the line are not listed.
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 Portage Lake reaches the Bay of Fundy and the Atlantic Ocean by way of the Fish and the Saint John: about 310 river miles.
Lake on the way: Square Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Portage Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Portage Lake has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in July; winter nights fall to about 3° in January. A normal year brings about 118 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 41 inches of water.
On November 14 Portage Lake normally reaches 40° and falls to 26°. The record high is 60°, in 1951; the record low 3°, in 2019. The most rain on this date, 2.22 in, fell in 2006.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1939 from the Caribou Area threaded record (Caribou Wfo, 23 miles east-northeast, 140 ft lower). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
