The Farwell 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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−8° on Nov. 14, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is −5° in 1940.
Farwell’s center stands about 1,340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,270 ft to 1,410 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Tower Hill, about 1,600 ft, 7 miles north.
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 46×. 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 14 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Orthogneiss, migmatite. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 4 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 Farwell reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Chippewa, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,200 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 Farwell; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Farwell has a dry-winter warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 2° in January. About 24 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Farwell normally reaches 38° and falls to 24°. The record high is 69°, in 1953; the record low −8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.22 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Alexandria Chandler Field, 13 miles northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
