The Elk 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.
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Showers likely
Elk Lake’s center stands about 1,250 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,150 ft to 1,300 ft, a difference of 150 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Tower Hill, about 1,600 ft, 10 miles east-southeast.
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 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 54×. 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 17 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 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 Elk Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Chippewa, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,220 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
1,750 miles of the trip are on the Mississippi.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Elk Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
