The La Prairie 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.
Partly cloudy
Mostly sunny; warmer
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Chance of showers
Showers likely
68° on Nov. 17, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1915. Next is 67° in 1953.
La Prairie’s center stands about 1,300 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,250 ft to 1,430 ft, a difference of 180 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Big Thunder Peak, about 1,820 ft, 11 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Coleraine Formation (conglomerate, lignite, sandstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 94 to 100 million 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 51×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Conglomerate, lignite, sandstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 94 to 100 million years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Banded-iron-formation, sedimentary-breccia. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 2 billion years old. About 0.8 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 La Prairie reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Prairie and the Mississippi: about 2,150 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 La Prairie; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
La Prairie has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about −1° in January. A normal year brings about 60 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
On November 14 La Prairie normally reaches 37° and falls to 21°. The record high is 65°, in 1953; the record low −9°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.54 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1915 at Grand Rapids Forestry Lab, here. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
