The Lake Benton 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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75° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1877. Next is 72° in 1949.
Lake Benton’s center stands about 1,780 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,740 ft to 1,970 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Stony Point, about 1,970 ft, 13 miles southeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Undifferentiated (conglomerate, sandstone, mudstone), from the Late Cretaceous, 72 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 56×. 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, sandstone, mudstone. Age: Late Cretaceous, 72 to 100 million years old. About 15 mi of the line.
Quartzite, mudstone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Quartzite. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2.5 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. 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 Lake Benton reaches the Gulf of America by way of Lake Benton, Coon Creek, the Redwood, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,160 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Pepin and Lake Benton.
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 Lake Benton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Lake Benton has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 5° in January. A normal year brings about 40 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 29 inches of water.
On November 14 Lake Benton normally reaches 42° and falls to 23°. The record high is 75°, in 1999; the record low −12°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.38 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1877 at Pipestone, 17 miles south, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
