The Fairfax 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
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
67° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1890. Next is 66° in 2001.
Fairfax’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 910 ft, a difference of 30 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Schist of sedimentary protolith, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 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.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Biotite-schist, migmatite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gabbro, peridotite, pyroxenite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Gabbro, pyroxenite, diorite. 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 Fairfax reaches Hudson Bay by way of Burnham Creek, the Red Lake, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 990 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
400 miles of the trip are on the Nelson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Fairfax; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Fairfax has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. About 22 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Fairfax normally reaches 37° and falls to 20°. The record high is 64°, in 2016; the record low −11°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 0.89 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1890 at Crookston Nw Experiment Sta, 8 miles north-northwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
