The St. Francis 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
Mostly cloudy
Partly cloudy
Showers likely
70° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1940. Next is 65° in 2010.
St. Francis’s center stands about 900 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 890 ft to 970 ft, a difference of 80 ft: gently rolling country.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Upper Cambrian (sandstone, siltstone, shale), from the Cambrian, 487 to 497 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 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.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Cambrian, 487 to 497 million years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Sandstone, siltstone, shale. Age: Middle Cambrian to Cambrian, 487 to 521 million years old. About 11 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 St. Francis reaches the Gulf of America by way of Seelye Brook, the Rum and the Mississippi: about 1,870 river miles.
Lake on the way: Lake Pepin.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of St. Francis; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
St. Francis has a hot-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 84° in July; winter nights fall to about 3° in January. A normal year brings about 36 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 33 inches of water.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1940 at Elk River, 11 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
