The Clam 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.
Mostly cloudy
Mostly cloudy; warmer
Mostly sunny
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
72° on Nov. 11, 2022, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1909. Next is 67° in 1953.
Clam Lake’s center stands about 1,340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,280 ft to 1,510 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Saginaw Formation (sandstone, shale), from the Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old.
The section below crosses 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 43×. 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, shale. Age: Carboniferous, 299 to 324 million years old. About 18 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Carboniferous, 324 to 359 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Shale. Age: Jurassic, 145 to 202 million years old. About 0.5 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 Clam Lake reaches Lake Michigan by way of the North Branch Pine, the Pine River and the Manistee: about 85 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 Clam Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Clam Lake has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 12° in January. About 35 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Clam Lake normally reaches 44° and falls to 29°. The record high is 63°, in 1953; the record low 2°, in 1943. The most rain on this date, 0.88 in, fell in 1980.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1909 at Cadillac Wexford County Airport, 6 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
