The Whitefish 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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−4° on Nov. 16, 2019, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1968. Next is 3° in 1995.
Whitefish’s center stands about 710 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 630 ft to 760 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country.
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 4 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 52×. 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 7 mi of the line.
Limestone. Age: Late Ordovician, 445 to 459 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Dolostone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 0.8 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 Whitefish reaches Lake Superior by way of Cheney Creek and the Tahquamenon: about 7 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 Whitefish; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Whitefish has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 76° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in February. A normal year brings about 170 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 40 inches of water.
On November 14 Whitefish normally reaches 40° and falls to 25°. The record high is 58°, in 1994; the record low 11°, in 1996. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1982.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1968 at Tahquamenon Falls S P, 5 miles west. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
