The Mentor 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.
69° on Nov. 17, 1953, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1913. Next is 65° in 1939.
Mentor’s center stands about 1,170 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,130 ft to 1,220 ft, a difference of 90 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mafic to ultramafic hypabyssal intrusive complexes composed of gabbro, pyroxenite, diorite, and anorthosite, from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 9 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.
Gabbro, pyroxenite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 5 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 4 mi of the line.
Tonalite, granodiorite, diorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Biotite-schist, migmatite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Granitic. 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. 3 smaller units along the line are not listed.
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 Mentor reaches Hudson Bay by way of Lower Badger Creek, the Clearwater, the Red Lake, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,060 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 Mentor; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Mentor has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about −3° in January. A normal year brings about 50 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 24 inches of water.
On November 14 Mentor normally reaches 36° and falls to 20°. The record high is 65°, in 1939; the record low −18°, in 1919. The most rain on this date, 1.65 in, fell in 1928.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1913 at Red Lake Falls, 14 miles north-northwest, 130 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.