The Dryden 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
74° on Nov. 16, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1956. Next is 72° in 1999.
Dryden’s center stands about 980 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 970 ft to 1,020 ft, a difference of 50 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Sandstone, siltstone, and local conglomerate, from the Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.2 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 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.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 million years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone. Age: Mesoproterozoic, 1 to 1.2 billion years old. About 8 mi of the line.
Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 1.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 0.1 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 Dryden reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Rush, the Minnesota 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 Dryden; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Dryden has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 6° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Dryden normally reaches 41° and falls to 26°. The record high is 69°, in 1990; the record low −5°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.34 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1956 at Gaylord, 4 miles southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
