The Blue Mounds 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
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
−12° on Nov. 12, 1966, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1945. Next is −8° in 1959.
Blue Mounds’s center stands about 1,200 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,080 ft to 1,310 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic orthogneiss and migmatite (orthogneiss, migmatite), from the Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old.
The section below crosses 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 53×. 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 10 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss, migmatite. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 7 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 Blue Mounds reaches the Gulf of America by way of Signalness Creek, Outlet Creek, the Chippewa, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,170 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 Blue Mounds; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Blue Mounds has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 1° in January. A normal year brings about 43 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 28 inches of water.
On November 14 Blue Mounds normally reaches 42° and falls to 22°. The record high is 69°, in 1990; the record low −5°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.40 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1945 at Benson, 16 miles south-southwest, 170 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
