The Loon Lake 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
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Chance of showers
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Showers likely
69° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1887. Next is 68° in 1999.
Loon Lake’s center stands about 1,270 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,220 ft to 1,350 ft, a difference of 130 ft: gently rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Ghost Hill, about 1,600 ft, 10 miles southwest.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Schist of sedimentary protolith, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion 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 53×. The colored band under the surface is the rock the state geologic map shows at the surface, not a picture of what lies beneath.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 12 mi of the line.
Schist. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 9 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 1 mi of the line.
Dioritic, granodiorite. Age: Archean to Paleoproterozoic. About 1 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 Loon Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of Mayo Creek, the Gull, the Crow Wing and the Mississippi: about 2,010 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Lake Pepin and Gull Lake.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Loon Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Loon Lake has a dry-winter warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about 0° in January. About 24 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Loon Lake normally reaches 40° and falls to 22°. The record high is 67°, in 1953; the record low −5°, in 1986. The most rain on this date, 0.55 in, fell in 1997.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1887 from the Brainerd Area threaded record (Brainerd Crow Wing County Airport, 17 miles southeast). NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
