The Sands 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. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1961. Next is 65° in 2001.
Sands’s center stands about 1,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 820 ft to 1,270 ft, a difference of 450 ft: hilly country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Summit Mountain, about 1,820 ft, 11 miles west.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Jacobsville Sandstone, from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Sandstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.6 billion years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Gneiss, amphibolite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Banded-iron-formation. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Quartzite, dolostone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 2 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 Sands reaches Lake Superior by way of Cedar Creek and the Chocolay: about 6 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 Sands; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Sands has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 76° in July; winter nights fall to about 7° in January. A normal year brings about 197 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 37 inches of water.
On November 14 Sands normally reaches 38° and falls to 25°. The record high is 59°, in 2001; the record low 5°, in 1995. The most rain on this date, 0.51 in, fell in 2020.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1961 from the Marquette County Area threaded record (Marquette Wfo, 10 miles northwest, 220 ft higher). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
