The Viding 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.
65° on Nov. 13, 1999, the hottest reading for this week of the year since 1962. Next is 65° in 2001.
Viding’s center stands about 890 ft above sea level. Within three miles the land runs from 880 ft to 900 ft, a difference of 20 ft: nearly flat ground.
Under the town center the state geologic map shows Mafic metavolcanic rocks (metabasalt, greenstone), from the Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old.
The section below crosses 5 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.
Metabasalt, greenstone. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 13 mi of the line.
Granitic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 6 mi of the line.
Granite, granodiorite. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Shale, sandstone. Age: Early Cretaceous to Late Cretaceous, 66 to 145 million years old. About 2 mi of the line.
Alkalic-volcanic. Age: Neoarchean, 2.5 to 2.8 billion years old. About 0.4 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 Viding reaches Hudson Bay by way of Felton Creek, the Wild Rice, the Red River of the North and the Nelson: about 1,060 river miles. Past the border it runs north through Canada to Hudson Bay.
Lake on the way: Lake Winnipeg.
400 miles of the trip are on the Nelson.
Traced down the USGS NHDPlus V2.1 river network from the Census center point of Viding; river miles along the main stem, rounded.
Viding has a warm-summer humid continental climate. Summer afternoons average 82° in July; winter nights fall to about −1° in January. A normal year brings about 41 inches of snow; with the rain, that comes to about 25 inches of water.
On November 14 Viding normally reaches 38° and falls to 22°. The record high is 62°, in 2025; the record low 0°, in 2014. The most rain on this date, 0.30 in, fell in 1971.
Normals 1991–2020 and records since 1962 at Georgetown 1 E, 7 miles west-southwest. NOAA, through RCC-ACIS.