The Cottage Grove 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.
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy; warmer
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
73° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 72° in 1990.
Cottage Grove’s center stands about 820 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 680 ft to 1,010 ft, a difference of 330 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Melander Hill, about 1,130 ft, 12 miles east.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Lower Ordovician (dolostone, sandstone), from the Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million 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 48×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Shale, limestone, sandstone. Age: Middle Ordovician to Late Ordovician, 445 to 471 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Dolostone, sandstone. Age: Early Ordovician, 471 to 487 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 5 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 Cottage Grove reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Mississippi: about 1,800 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Cottage Grove; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Cottage Grove has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 83° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. About 33 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Cottage Grove normally reaches 44° and falls to 27°. The record high is 72°, in 1990; the record low 7°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.24 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Hastings Dam 2, 6 miles southeast, 140 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
