The Bear Creek 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 sunny
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
73° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1911. Next is 67° in 1934.
Bear Creek’s center stands about 1,510 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,400 ft to 1,620 ft, a difference of 220 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Jack Pine Hill, about 1,990 ft, 14 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic intrusion, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 2 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.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 23 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.9 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.
Bear Creek straddles the Laurentian Divide. Rain on the northwest side runs to Hudson Bay; most of the rest goes to the Gulf of America.
From the center of town, a raindrop reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Mississippi: about 2,300 river miles. One that lands on the northwest side reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Wild Rice, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,200 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lakes on the way: Sugar Lake, Buck Lake, Lake Pepin and Lake Bemidji.
1,750 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Bear Creek; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Bear Creek has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. A normal year brings about 52 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Bear Creek normally reaches 35° and falls to 19°. The record high is 70°, in 1953; the record low −20°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.00 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1911 at Itasca University Of Minn, 10 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
