The Spruce Hill 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
Partly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Chance of showers
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
−8° on Nov. 14, 1959, the coldest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is −5° in 1940.
Spruce Hill’s center stands about 1,410 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,350 ft to 1,460 ft, a difference of 110 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Volcaniclastic rocks of felsic to intermediate composition (felsic-volcanic), from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 6 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.
Schist. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Schist, paragneiss. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 7 mi of the line.
Felsic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Gabbro, peridotite, pyroxenite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 3 mi of the line.
Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.8 to 2 billion years old. About 0.9 mi of the line.
Slate, graywacke. Age: Paleoproterozoic, 1.6 to 2 billion years old. About 0.6 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 Spruce Hill reaches the Gulf of America by way of Spruce Creek, the Long Prairie, the Crow Wing and the Mississippi: about 2,070 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 Spruce Hill; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Spruce Hill has a dry-winter warm-summer continental climate. Summer afternoons average 80° in July; winter nights fall to about 2° in January. About 24 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Spruce Hill normally reaches 38° and falls to 24°. The record high is 69°, in 1953; the record low −8°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.22 in, fell in 1951.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Alexandria Chandler Field, 16 miles south-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
