The Ruthton 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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Partly cloudy
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Showers likely
79° on Nov. 14, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1973. Next is 72° in 2001.
Ruthton’s center stands about 1,730 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,680 ft to 1,910 ft, a difference of 230 ft: rolling country. The highest named summit within 15 miles is Stony Point, about 1,970 ft, 4 miles south-southwest.
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 2 rock units mapped at the surface.
Heights every 0.1 mile from the Copernicus GLO-90 surface model; vertical exaggeration about 45×. 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 14 mi of the line.
Quartzite, mudstone. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 10 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 Ruthton reaches the Gulf of America by way of the Redwood, the Minnesota and the Mississippi: about 2,150 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
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 Ruthton; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Ruthton has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 81° in July; winter nights fall to about 4° in January. A normal year brings about 46 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 30 inches of water.
On November 14 Ruthton normally reaches 41° and falls to 22°. The record high is 79°, in 1999; the record low −4°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 1.12 in, fell in 2024.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1973 at Lake Wilson, 15 miles south-southeast. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
