The Parke 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
Mostly cloudy; cooler
Chance of showers
69° on Nov. 11, 2005, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1895. Next is 68° in 2001.
Parke’s center stands about 1,340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,130 ft to 1,460 ft, a difference of 330 ft: rolling country.
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 3 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 36×. 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 6 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. 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 Parke reaches Hudson Bay by way of Hay Creek, Stony Creek, the South Branch Buffalo, the Buffalo, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,150 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
420 miles of the trip are on the Red River of the North.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Parke; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Parke has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 79° in July; winter nights fall to about −4° in January. A normal year brings about 48 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Parke normally reaches 38° and falls to 20°. The record high is 63°, in 1953; the record low −11°, in 1940. The most rain on this date, 0.65 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1895 at Detroit Lakes 1 NNE, 19 miles east-northeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
