The Big Bend 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
75° on Nov. 16, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 74° in 1953.
Big Bend’s center stands about 980 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 970 ft to 1,040 ft, a difference of 70 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitoid gneiss with dioritic to amphibolitic enclaves (orthogneiss), from the Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 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 64×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Leucocratic-granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss, migmatite. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 3 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 Big Bend reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Chippewa, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,110 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
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 Big Bend; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Big Bend has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 4° in January. A normal year brings about 51 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Big Bend normally reaches 44° and falls to 25°. The record high is 72°, in 2025; the record low −10°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1927.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Milan 1 NW, 7 miles west-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
