The Grand Marais 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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Grand Marais’s center stands about 630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 590 ft to 960 ft, a difference of 370 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Grand Sable Dunes, about 980 ft, 5 miles west-southwest.
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 40×. 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.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 0.3 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 0.1 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.
Rain that falls on Grand Marais runs straight into Lake Superior. 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 Grand Marais; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
