The Cold Spring 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
Showers likely
70° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1892. Next is 68° in 1953.
Cold Spring’s center stands about 1,110 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,080 ft to 1,340 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granite, from the Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 5 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 51×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 10 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss, schist. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion 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 Cold Spring reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Sauk and the Mississippi: about 1,930 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cold Spring; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cold Spring has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 4° in January. A normal year brings about 57 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 31 inches of water.
On November 14 Cold Spring normally reaches 40° and falls to 25°. The record high is 67°, in 1990; the record low −4°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 0.91 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1892 at Collegeville St. John'S, 9 miles north-northeast, 100 ft higher. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
