The Turtle Lake 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
Partly cloudy
Mostly cloudy
Chance of showers
Mostly cloudy
Showers likely
65° on Nov. 15, 2025, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1943. Next is 64° in 1981.
Turtle Lake’s center stands about 1,340 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 1,330 ft to 1,470 ft, a difference of 140 ft: gently 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 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.
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 5 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.
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 Turtle Lake reaches the Gulf of America by way of Buck Lake and the Mississippi: about 2,270 river miles.
Lakes on the way: Sugar Lake, Buck Lake and 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 Turtle Lake; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Turtle Lake has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 77° in July; winter nights fall to about −3° in January. About 23 inches of rain fall in a normal year.
On November 14 Turtle Lake normally reaches 35° and falls to 21°. The record high is 64°, in 2016; the record low −11°, in 1959. The most rain on this date, 0.81 in, fell in 1944.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1943 at Red Lake Indian Agcy, 19 miles north-northwest, 120 ft lower. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.
