The Lac qui Parle 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
Mostly sunny
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
75° on Nov. 16, 2001, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1893. Next is 74° in 1953.
Lac qui Parle’s center stands about 1,020 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 930 ft to 1,050 ft, a difference of 120 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitoid gneiss with dioritic to amphibolitic enclaves (orthogneiss), from the Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 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 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.
Orthogneiss. Age: Paleoarchean to Mesoarchean, 2.8 to 3.6 billion years old. About 14 mi of the line.
Conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Leucocratic-granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 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 Lac qui Parle reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Lac qui Parle, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,120 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 Lac qui Parle; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lac qui Parle has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 85° in July; winter nights fall to about 4° in January. A normal year brings about 51 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 27 inches of water.
On November 14 Lac qui Parle normally reaches 44° and falls to 25°. The record high is 72°, in 2025; the record low −10°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 1.25 in, fell in 1927.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1893 at Milan 1 NW, 8 miles north. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
