The Elbow Lake 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
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Chance of showers
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
67° on Nov. 11, 2005, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1977. Next is 63° in 2016.
Elbow Lake’s center stands about 1,610 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,490 ft to 1,750 ft, a difference of 260 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Jack Pine Hill, about 1,990 ft, 8 miles north-northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic intrusion, 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 37×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 19 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.6 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 Elbow Lake reaches Hudson Bay by way of the Otter Tail, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,370 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lakes on the way: Otter Tail Lake, Big Pine Lake, Height of Land Lake 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 Elbow Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Elbow Lake has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1977 at Tamarac Wildlife Ref, 14 miles south-southwest, 100 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
