The Donnelly 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
74° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1885. Next is 71° in 1954.
Donnelly’s center stands about 1,130 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,090 ft to 1,170 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Schist and tonalitic to granodioritic paragneiss (schist, paragneiss), from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 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.
Schist, paragneiss. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss, migmatite. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 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.
Donnelly straddles the Laurentian Divide. Rain on the southeast side runs to the Gulf of America; most of the rest goes to Hudson Bay.
From the center of town, a raindrop reaches Hudson Bay by way of Twelvemile Creek, the Mustinka, the Bois de Sioux, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,310 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay. One that lands on the southeast side reaches the Gulf of America by way of Muddy Creek, the Pomme de Terre, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,190 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Traverse and Lake Winnipeg.
550 miles of the trip are on the Red River of the North.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Donnelly; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Donnelly has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 1° in January. A normal year brings about 45 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Donnelly normally reaches 40° and falls to 22°. The record high is 69°, in 1999; the record low −10°, in 1932. The most rain on this date, 0.80 in, fell in 1909.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1885 at Morris West Central Research And Outreach Center, 10 miles southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
