The Little Elbow 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
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy; cooler
Showers likely
67° on Nov. 11, 2005, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1977. Next is 63° in 2016.
Little Elbow’s center stands about 1,630 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,520 ft to 1,790 ft, a difference of 270 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Jack Pine Hill, about 1,990 ft, 7 miles northeast.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Granitic intrusion, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 39×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 17 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 7 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 Little Elbow reaches Hudson Bay by way of Little Elbow Creek, Gull Creek, the White Earth, the Wild Rice, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,170 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 Little Elbow; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Little Elbow has a cold desert climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. Barely 0.0 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1977 at Tamarac Wildlife Ref, 16 miles south, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
