The Bay Mills 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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66° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1888. Next is 64° in 2012.
Bay Mills’s center stands about 660 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 590 ft to 980 ft, a difference of 390 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Mission Hill, about 1,050 ft, 6 miles east-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Munising Formation (sandstone), from the Cambrian, 487 to 497 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 44×. 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. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Limestone, dolostone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 1 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 Bay Mills reaches Lake Superior by way of Pendills Creek: about 2 river miles. From there it moves on through the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bay Mills; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bay Mills has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in July; winter nights fall to about 8° in January. A normal year brings about 120 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 34 inches of water.
On November 14 Bay Mills normally reaches 42° and falls to 29°. The record high is 60°, in 1909; the record low −1°, in 1933. The most rain on this date, 1.34 in, fell in 1957.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1888 from the Sault Ste Marie Area threaded record (Sault Ste Marie Sanderson Field, 20 miles east). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
